Slowly. They make hat stretchers. Probably want to make sure the material is well hydrated. I’d do it carefully over several weeks or months, maybe misting it with some water.

XML sucks- gradle was a groovy DSL which was very concise and easy, it was quite nice!

I wrote Java and jvm languages for a long time. Mostly a good experience. Maven and later gradle, groovy and spring boot really made it more fun to use. Spock is still my favorite testing framework. These days it’s all python and node for me though- but using those languages and their popular libs really shows how much better dependency management and testing was in the Java ecosystem even 10 years ago.