Over a two-month period, this developer enhanced security and reliability across the hivemq-community-edition and hivemq-edge repositories by implementing configuration-driven credential handling and refining MQTT session management. Using Java, Kotlin, and Gradle, they introduced post-authentication password clearing and conditional extension SDK imports to reduce credential leakage risks and align with compliance requirements. Their work also addressed resource management by decoupling Will Publish storage from CONNECT messages, ensuring per-client lifecycle handling and preventing memory leaks. These backend improvements strengthened authentication, network security, and plugin initialization, resulting in more robust deployments and improved maintainability for both core and edge components.