We don’t have release branches, the commit is just tagged as being currently deployed in production.

People merge their feature branches to master during working hours (by merging CI validated PRs) and release when they get a chance. Normally do about 10-20 releases per day.

No idea, I’ve never used either of those tools.

I think some people still use Maven, but I use Gradle in all of mine. Gradle build files are written in Kotlin instead of XML like Maven.

Spring moved away from XML ages ago. I work on a 6 year old Spring project and it has never had a single line of XML in it.

I reported my bike stolen in college and I got a call the next day that they had found it parked in front of a nearby church.

It was stolen on a Sunday. I guess someone didn’t want to be late to service.