CodeMash 2025 and a new way to bootstrap your Spring applications 🔥
Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. I’m attending and speaking at my first conference of the new year this week and I’m excited to kick off 2025. This week marks 3 years at VMware / Broadcom for me which means I am heading into year number 4 of my dream job.
I published a blog post 3 years ago about my journey to VMware and how excited I was to be joining this amazing team. A lot has changed since then but I’m so grateful to still be here and doing what I love every single day. I’m currently writing a chapter on career management for my upcoming book “Fundamentals of Software Engineering” and I put I quote in there that I love
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."
- Steve Jobs
I wholeheartedly believe this: while we sometimes need to take jobs out of necessity, we should never lose sight of our dreams. If you have a career goal, make sure you're working toward it every single day. I'm truly blessed to be doing what I love, and I'm looking forward to starting my fourth year in this position in 2025.
CodeMash
CodeMash 2025 in beautiful Sandusky Ohio is taking place this week, and I’m looking forward to being back there. This is my 3rd time attending and speaking at this conference and it should be another great event.
This year I am speaking on building GraphQL APIs in Java but I’m putting a bit of a wrinkle on this years presentation. I have given many versions of this presentation that have all included a large number of slides. This year I have decided to cut my slides down to 3. We are going to spend the full hour live coding building out GraphQL APIs in Java and Spring and exploring all of the features of Spring for GraphQL.
This conference has a wide variety of tracks / languages and while it isn’t a huge Java conference there are going to be some really good Java talks. I will check out as many as I can and tell you about them next week. I’m also really excited to catch up with my friends Chris Judd and Nate Schutta.
It should be a great week and if you will be there please say hi 👋🏻
Spring Initializr on Raycast
One of my favorite Mac apps just got better—thanks to a little help from me! If you're on a Mac and haven't heard of Raycast, it's an application that replaces Spotlight and serves as your shortcut for everything. I use it to quickly launch apps, and it has an amazing set of extensions for doing pretty much anything.
Anyone can build these extensions by checking out the Raycast documentation. Despite my limited experience with React, I figured I could build my first extension with the help of AI.
I wanted to create an extension that would let you build a new Spring Boot Application directly from Raycast. The web interface and IDE extensions all pull their metadata from a single endpoint, which meant I could fetch the API data without needing to constantly update the extension.
I'm happy to announce that this extension is now available in the Raycast Store. Please give it a try—I'd love your feedback.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter installment, and I will talk to you in the next one. If you have any questions for me or topics you would like me to cover please feel free to reply to this email or reach out to me on Twitter (I’m not calling it X).
Happy Coding,
Dan Vega
https://www.danvega.dev