5.30 am, before the tiffin boxes: relearning Java after a 7 year break (and what changed since Java 8)
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Good morning everyone. It is 5.30 am in Pune, the children are asleep, the milk has not come yet, and I have about 50 minutes. So I will write fast. Kindly excuse any mistakes.
I was a Java developer at a service company until 2018. Then two children, and my father-in-law's illness, and I took a break that was supposed to be one year and became seven. Three months ago I decided to come back. Many people here have helped me, so I want to share what I have found, in case someone else is returning after a break.
My routine
- 5.30 to 6.20 am: study before the house wakes up. Only one topic per day.
- 6.20 to 8.30 am: tiffin boxes, school uniforms, one lost sock every day without fail.
- 10.30 to 11.30 pm: practice, after the children sleep. Small programs only.
- Sunday afternoon: mock interview with Sneha (laidoff_not_out on this site), who is also job hunting. We are each other's interviewer.
What changed in Java since 8 (the things that surprised me)
I last worked on Java 8. Now Java 21 is what most job descriptions ask for, and 25 is the newest LTS. These are the changes I had to learn first, because every interview asked about them:
varfor local variables (Java 10).var orders = new ArrayList<Order>();. I found this strange at first. Now I like it.- Records (Java 16). A whole DTO with getters, equals, hashCode and toString in one line:
record Order(String id, BigDecimal amount) {}. In 2018 I wrote these by hand. Many, many of them. - Text blocks (Java 15). Multi-line strings with three double quotes. No more string concatenation for SQL.
- Pattern matching and switch expressions (Java 14 to 21).
if (obj instanceof Order o)without a cast, and a switch that returns a value. - Virtual threads (Java 21). This is the big one in interviews. Thousands of lightweight threads for blocking I/O without the old thread pool tuning.
- Spring Boot 3 needs Java 17 or later, and
javax.*becamejakarta.*. This one confused me for two full days.
What I find hardest
Not the Java. The confidence. In my first mock interview I apologised four times in ten minutes. Sneha counted. Now we have a rule: every "sorry" is five push-ups. My arms are stronger and my apologies are fewer.
And the career gap question. Every interviewer asks it. I used to explain too much. Now I say: "I took a career break to care for my family. During that time I managed a household of six and my father-in-law's hospital care, and for the last three months I have been studying full time. I am ready to work." Then I stop talking. This was Sneha's advice and it works.
The milk has come. I must go. Thank you for reading. नमस्कार 🙂
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