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Java Annotated Monthly – January 2026

Irina Mariasova
Irina Mariasova

Happy New Year and welcome to the first Java Annotated Monthly of 2026! We hope this year brings fresh ideas, smarter ways to stay productive, and innovation that lasts.

JAM, as always, is your island of stability in the fast-moving tech world, bringing the coolest news and practical tips. This time, we are starting strong with the amazing Neha Sardana as our featured content guest. Let’s dive in!

Featured Content 

Neha Sardana, currently serving as the Vice President and Senior Developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, brings over a decade of experience in the financial services industry across Europe and the US. Apart from her professional commitments, Neha is an active member of the Garden State JUG and NYJavaSIG, where she contributes her expertise in Java technology. As a fervent supporter of open-source software (OSS), she enjoys discussing and writing about everything related to it on her blog.

Hello again, and Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday with your friends and family. I’ve been on parental leave since August with a new baby and a toddler at home –  I have two under three and life is a mess, of course. With all that going on, I’ve still managed to read a bit about something other than AI, since we seem to be talking about it constantly these days.

Recently, I’ve been digging into Project Valhalla. I keep comparing these features to Scala, which I’ve been using for a while now, and it’s honestly great to see these ideas finally making their way into the Java ecosystem.

Right now, Java treats almost everything like a heavy object that needs its own “ID card” (identity). Valhalla lets us tell the JVM, “Hey, this is just a piece of data, treat it like a primitive.” It cuts out the memory bloat and makes the cache much happier. Even if you aren’t writing low-level library code, it’s a big deal because the frameworks we use every day are going to get a massive performance boost for free. It’s essentially Java finally admitting that we should be able to write clean code without the “object tax” dragging everything down.

Valhalla has been in the works forever, but with the recent JEP 401 updates, it’s finally starting to feel like a real thing we can use rather than just a research project. Between this and Project Loom, it feels like Java is finally growing up and giving us the tools to write idiomatic code without forcing us to trade performance for readability. Even if you never touch a value class yourself, you’ll feel the impact once the collections and libraries we all rely on start getting swapped out under the hood.

Here are some links to get started:

Valhalla may still be evolving, but understanding what it’s trying to solve today will make the next generation of Java features feel much less surprising when they arrive.

Java News

All the December Java news is here:

Java Tutorials and Tips

Don’t miss these tutorials and tips for peak Java productivity:

Kotlin Corner

Check out the monthly Kotlin highlights: 

AI 

The AI world never stops, so stay up to date with a handpicked set of helpful articles:

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, and Technologies

Spring updates and other tech news are ready to explore: 

Conferences and Events

Don’t miss: 

Culture and Community

Career growth, the developer’s place in the AI world, and the kind of questions people share over coffee: 

And Finally…

The coolest and most helpful articles from the IntelliJ IDEA team: 

That’s it for today! We’re always collecting ideas for the next Java Annotated Monthly – send us your suggestions via email or X by January 20. Don’t forget to check out our archive of past JAM issues for any articles you might have missed!

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Prev post Thread Dumps and Project Loom (Virtual Threads)
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