Spring Office Hours turns 1, Spring I/O and Spring AI

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. It's being a while since my last update and I apologize for that, but I have been pretty busy with life and work.

I don’t want to let the cat of the bag just yet, but I had a really great meeting last week about an upcoming project that I am beyond excited about. This is something that I have been thinking about for as long as I can remember, and it is one of those projects that have been at the top of my career bucket list. As soon as it becomes official I will tell you more about it.

In this edition of the newsletter I want to talk about the podcast turning 1, Spring I/O and Spring AI.

Spring Office Hours Podcast

DaShaun and I have been working on the Spring Office Hours live stream for about 2 years. I was reminded a couple of weeks ago that we hit the 1-year milestone for launching the podcast and what a year it's been. I bring this up because I want to share some valuable advice with you.

We kept going back and forth on when would be ready to launch the podcast portion of Spring Office Hours. We needed a great intro, hook, theme music and a more professional sounding show. We needed to make sure we had a list of great guests lined up, and we needed to make sure we had some really great topics planned.

No we didn’t. We just needed to start it. I don’t know about you but the idea of perfection used to stop me from starting things. Now I see the perfection in imperfection and I’m here to tell you it’s so much better on this side. The next time you are struggling with these decisions just get started right now and remember that you can always improve what you’re doing over time.

Spring Office Hours Road Show

I’m also excited to announce that we are taking Spring Office Hours on the road this year. We are still working on what these shows are going to look like but we are excited to do some live recordings of the podcast this year. If you’re going to be at any of the following conferences be on the lookout for our live show

• Spring I/O
• KCDC
• SpringOne

Spring Security with Dan

Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with my colleague Daniel Garnier-Moiroux. We had a chance to preview his upcoming talk at Spring I/O, what’s new in Spring Security 6.3 as well as answering some questions live. I love chatting with Daniel because he is just an amazing person and has so much experience that I always leave our conversations learning something.

Spring I/O

I am really excited to be heading to my very first Spring I/O in Barcelona Spain at the end of the month. I was just in Barcelona for the first time in November and wow what a beautiful city it was, but it was also a little colder out. I’m looking forward to experiencing the city with some better running weather.

I have heard so many great things about Spring I/O and I can’t wait to take in the talks, the people and everything that the conference has to offer. I will be giving a talk on navigating the frontend landscape for Spring Developers. The idea behind this talk is that you’re a Spring Developer and you need to build out a frontend for your application, what technology do you use to do it? There are so many questions that go into this decision and in this session I will try and answer some of them.

I already threw out this question on Twitter and got a lot of really great answers. If you have questions please add them to this tweet or email me and I will try to answer them. Over the couple of weeks and even after my presentation I am going to focus a lot of my content on this subject.

https://twitter.com/therealdanvega/status/1788654559843209302

Spring AI

It’s been awhile since you have heard from and during that time I have been pretty busy working on Spring AI tutorials. We are getting close to a Spring AI milestone and with that comes an understanding that some things will change between now and that highly anticipated 1.0 release.

In the meantime I have focused on putting together tutorials to cover all the basics of building intelligent applications in Java with Spring AI. If you have ever wanted to build an application that talks to one of the Large Language Models (LLMs) like Open AI’s GPT-4 there are REST APIs available. You might wonder why would I need a library when I can simply call the REST API in Java using JDK Http Client or in Spring using something like the Rest Client.

The answer is you can but as you start to build out these applications you will quickly find out that you need to solve for certain problems. When you get a response from the LLM how do you turn that into something you can work with? How can you augment the LLM with your organizations private data? These are just a couple of the questions I answer in this series of videos.

• Spring AI’s Output Parser
• Open AI - Stuffing the Prompt
• Java and Spring AI - Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Building a Spring Boot Documentation Assistant with AI
• Spring AI Function Calling

Until Next Week

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter installment, and I will talk to you in the next one. If you have any links you would like me to include please contact me and I might add them to a future newsletter. I hope you have a great week and as always friends...

Happy Coding
Dan Vega
danvega@gmail.com
https://www.danvega.dev