My path was: operate a high-volume service. It will fall over and force you to learn (unfortunately, through Googling). Less facetiously... I found searching f

My path was: operate a high-volume service. It will fall over and force you to learn (unfortunately, through Googling). Less facetiously... I found searching for blogs by quantitative traders useful. You can write JVM code that has excellent latency and throughput characteristics, but you need to know the sharp edges to avoid. A strategy that I think I used: find high performance collections libraries (trove, koloboke, fastutil). You'll likely need these anyway. Then find their authors, and go hunting for their blogs. They'll often list pitfalls. It's been years, so I don't remember the names of people I read, otherwise I'd share them -- sorry!