Dan Vega - Spring Developer Advocate, YouTuber and Lifelong Learner

Happy ~~Monday~~ Tuesday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. I was off yesterday as we observed Martin Luther King Jr so this is coming to you a day later this week.

If you don’t know I live outside of Cleveland OH and this area of the world is experiencing some real cold weather right now. As I am writing this on Monday afternoon it is currently 10º Fahrenheit with a low of 5º. It is so cold around here that they have preemptively canceled school for the kids for the next 2 days.

Given that I will be staying in and catching up on a lot of things. It’s been a busy start to the new year but I feel like I am finally in a place to start crossing some things off my list. To start I have a backlog of about 10 videos that I’m ready to record and I am going to start tackling those this week.

I also am beginning to plan out a couple of courses for the 1st part of the year including a full course on Spring AI. If there is anything you would like to see specifically from me I’m always welcome to feedback and suggestions.

Java Champions Conference

This week on Thursday 1/23/25 the Java Champions Conference kicks off for free virtually. This is a 4-day conference where all talks are given by Java Champions. I have had a chance to attend (virtually) past conferences, and they were always packed full of amazing content.

This year's lineup is no different and I’m really looking forward to it. Here are a few of the talks I will be locked in on.

CodeMash 2025 Recap

Last week was CodeMash right up the road from me in Sandusky OH. I believe this is my 3rd time attending and speaking at this wonderful conference. I usually take the family with me so the kids can enjoy the water park. We decided to skip that this year though because they were already sick for a week and didn’t want them to get sick again and miss more school.

It was another amazing conference and I particularly enjoyed catching up with my good friends Nate Schutta, Todd Sharp and Chris Judd. We had some time to chat about work, life and tech in general, and it is always great seeing them.

I gave a talk on building your first GraphQL API in Java using Spring for GraphQL. I have given a similar talk before and in fact I gave this talk last year at CodeMash. Knowing that I decided to switch it up this year and only came to the conference with 4 slides and decided I would do an hour of live coding.

CodeMash 2025

I thought it went really well, and it was pretty well attended. So thank you everyone who decided to spend an hour with me and I hope you learned something new. If you want to see the code we went through you can check it out on this GitHub Repo.

Building Effective Agents with Spring AI

If you have been paying attention to the world of AI all the buzz heading into 2025 is about AI Agents. If you’re curious about the basics of agents I wrote an article for my other newsletter ByteSized AI where I cover the fundamentals of AI agents.

In December 2024 Anthropic came out with a really great blog post on how to build effective agents. In this post, they share what they have learned from working with their customers and building agents themselves, and give practical advice for developers on how to build effective agents.

As a bit of a follow-up to this article Christian Tzolov (from the Spring AI team) just released an article “Building Effective Agents with Spring AI - Part 1” where he takes the lessons learned from the Anthropic blog post and applies them to Spring AI.

If you’re interested in building AI Agents in Java, and why wouldn’t you be this is a really great place to start. I’m going to be diving into voice assistants, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and AI agents in depth in 2025 so if that is something you’re interested in, stay tuned!

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