Spring Common Mistakes, AI Productivity Hack & IntelliJ Tips and Tricks
Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. It is really hard to believe that it is the middle of December. Well now that I think about it the weather has been extremely cold so it’s not that hard to believe. My family and I had a brunch with Santa even over the weekend and the girls absolutely loved it. I’m not a fan of this cold weather we have right now but I love seeing the girls happy so it makes everything worth it.
In today’s newsletter I want to start off by talking about some of the common mistakes we make as Spring Developers. From there we will dive into a productivity hack that I have been using when working with Large Language Models that has been a real time saver. I’ll share with you a conversation I had with Siva Reddy last week on Spring Office hours and my move to Figma for YouTube Thumbnail designs. I hope you have an amazing week as we start to close out the year!
Spring Common Mistakes
Last week I gave a presentation for the Software Craft Community at Datev on common mistakes Spring Developers make. I have talked about a few of these mistakes before but this is the first time that I put a bunch of them into presentation format. I actually have a ton of material on this and if we did a little more live coding this would probably be about a 2 hour presentation.
I want to thank Datev for having me and allowing me to ramble and for everyone who attended and asked so many great questions. If you’re interested in a deeper dive on this let me know, I’m considering making a series out of this for the YouTube channel.
The Best AI Productivity Hack
I want to share a productivity tip that's transformed my AI workflow: using voice dictation instead of typing. Rather than spending time crafting elaborate written prompts for tools like ChatGPT and Claude, I use my computer's built-in dictation feature (activated with a simple keyboard shortcut) to speak naturally to AI models.
The setup is straightforward – enable dictation in your system settings, choose a microphone, and assign a keyboard shortcut. For best results, use a quality microphone and structure your thoughts before speaking. The real power comes from treating AI interactions like conversations, iterating through dialogue rather than trying to craft perfect prompts.
I find this especially useful for content creation, technical documentation, and problem-solving discussions. The best part? It works anywhere there's a text input box, making it a universal tool for faster, more natural AI interactions. This simple change has saved me countless hours and made working with AI feel as natural as talking to a colleague.
IntelliJ Tips and Tricks with Siva
It was great to chat with Siva Reddy, Developer Advocate at JetBrains last week on Spring Office Hours. In this episode we talked with Siva about being a Developer Advocate, Spring & IntelliJ. I really enjoyed our conversation and I hope you will too.
YouTube Thumbnail Designs
I have used Adobe XD for designing my YouTube thumbnails for as long as I can remember. I use it because I have a subscription to the Creative Cloud Applications and its always just worked for me. Well Adobe is really no longer updating this software and when I got my new laptop I decided it was time to install and learn Figma.
I am not a designer but I find tools like this are easy to learn and I enjoy using them. The thumbnails I create are nothing special but I do try and make them nice. In macOS you can go into your photos app and find a image and copy the subject so I get a nice headshot of myself without the background and then paste that into my thumbnail. From there I try to use big text with simple backgrounds and add any little touches I can to it.
Here is my current thumbnail design board for some upcoming videos.
TWEETS
Chat GPT introduced projects last week 🤩
I am going to be working on more Spring AI and Google Gemini videos in the near future.
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.
Happy Coding,
Dan Vega
https://www.danvega.dev