But management had spoken. The auditors had sharpened their quills. Security vulnerabilities in the old JRE were piling up like unread terms of service. The order came down: Upgrade to JRE 17 by Q3.
And then came the moment of truth.
“Seventeen?” scoffed Leo, the cocky DevOps lead. “Why not 21? It’s the latest. Live a little.”
She replaced jaxb with the new Jakarta bindings. She refactored the ancient finalize() methods into clean Cleaner instances. She discovered the magic of --add-opens to temporarily pacify a proprietary library whose maintainers had vanished into the ether.