From Spring Office Hours to Spring AI Mastery

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. I want to start by extending a belated Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there. For me, it was a day filled with both happiness and sadness. On one hand, becoming a dad has always been my dream, and I couldn't be more blessed with my two little girls who fill my heart daily. On the other hand, this was my first Father's Day without my dad, who passed away late last year. I'm grateful for the time we spent together and take comfort knowing we'll meet again someday. Love you, Dad.

Last week, I spent time in Chicago with a customer. While it was a quick trip, it proved highly productive. I had the opportunity to deliver two presentations that were both well-received. I began by discussing what's new in Spring, recapping everything we've gained in the Spring Boot 3.x line. I focused on this because Spring Boot 3.3 just released in May and will be the last minor release in the 3.x line. After that, we explored what's coming in Spring Boot 3.4. I also presented on building intelligent applications in Java with Spring AI.

Additionally, I participated in a Spring One Tour over two days, where I presented on Spring AI and Spring for GraphQL. I absolutely love discussing all the exciting projects in the Spring ecosystem, and it was a fantastic week. This concludes my travel schedule until KCDC in mid-August, and I'm looking forward to some downtime to catch up on various projects. After that conference, I have a packed schedule through October, so I'll spend part of my summer preparing for all the amazing trips ahead. As always, if you're curious about my upcoming speaking engagements, you can check out my speaking page.

In this edition of the newsletter, I want to update you on what we've been doing on Spring Office Hours. I also spent the better part of last week preparing my comprehensive Spring AI course, which I'll be releasing on YouTube soon.

Spring Office Hours

DaShaun and I have been having a lot of fun with Spring Office Hours. It's really hard to believe that we are halfway through season 4 already but here we are. We have been doing our best to bring you some really great guests and cover a wide variety of topics. If you're new to Spring Office Hours we (usually) live stream every Monday from 1-2 EDT. You can catch the replays on the Spring Developer YouTube channel and we turn this into a podcast so you can listen to use wherever you get your podcasts. In case you have missed the last few episodes here is what we have been up to:

S4E14 - Spring AI 1.0 GA Release with Mark Pollak and Christian Tzolov

Join Dan Vega and DaShaun Carter as they celebrate a major milestone in the Spring ecosystem with the general availability release of Spring AI 1.0. In this episode, the hosts welcome Spring AI team members Mark Pollak and Christian Tzolov to discuss the incredible journey from conception to GA release. They'll explore the powerful features that make Spring AI the go-to framework for building AI-powered applications, dive into Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities, and share exciting insights about what's on the horizon for Spring AI. Whether you're new to AI development or a seasoned practitioner, this episode offers valuable perspectives on integrating AI into Spring applications and the future of enterprise AI development.

S4E15 - Exposing the Interview Process with Taylor Desseyn

Join Dan Vega and DaShaun Carter as they welcome Taylor Desseyn, VP of Global Community at torc.dev and founder of Dads in Tech. Fresh from his presentation "Exposing the Interview Process" at Spring I/O 2025 in Barcelona, Taylor shares unfiltered insights from interviewing thousands of engineers and helping hundreds of companies scale their engineering teams. The hosts dive deep into the current job market realities, interview best practices, and how developers can navigate today's challenging hiring landscape. Learn practical strategies to stand out in your job search and discover what's really happening behind the scenes in tech hiring.

S4E16 - Spring gRPC with Dave Syer and Chris Bono

Join Dan Vega and DaShaun Carter for the latest updates from the Spring Ecosystem. In this episode, Dan and DaShaun are joined by Spring team members Dave Syer and Chris Bono to explore the official Spring gRPC project. At the end of this episode, you will understand how Spring gRPC provides a Spring-friendly API for developing high-performance gRPC applications, including server and client autoconfiguration, Spring Boot integration, and streamlined Protocol Buffer handling. The hosts will demonstrate how to build gRPC services with Spring's familiar dependency injection patterns and discuss the benefits of gRPC's HTTP/2-based communication over traditional REST APIs.

Spring AI Course

Exciting news! I've been working hard behind the scenes on something special, and I wanted you to be the first to know about it.

After a ton of prep work, I'm heading into the studio this week to record a brand-new, comprehensive YouTube course: AI for Java Developers: Building Intelligent Applications with Spring AI.

The world of software is rapidly adopting Artificial Intelligence, and it's clear that building AI-powered apps is a critical new skill for Java developers. This course is my answer to that. It's designed specifically for the enterprise Java developer, skipping the deep ML theory to focus on practical, hands-on coding with the new Spring AI 1.0 framework.

As a subscriber to this newsletter, you'll get the exclusive first announcement the moment it goes live.

To give you a sneak peek at what's in store, here's the full agenda for the course.

Course Agenda 🗺️

This course is packed with practical lessons to take you from the basics to advanced real-world applications.

What You Will Learn:

• AI Fundamentals for Developers: Get a quick introduction to the core concepts of AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and LLMs, explained from a developer's point of view—no complex math required.
• Getting Started with Spring AI: We'll walk through setting up your environment, getting API keys, and building your first application with Spring AI's ChatClient.
• Mastering Prompt Engineering: Learn how to "talk" to AI models effectively. We'll cover everything from simple prompts to advanced techniques like few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought, and using XML tags for complex requests.
• Core Spring AI Features: Dive deep into the powerful features of Spring AI, including prompt templates, getting structured output (like JSON), and exploring multimodal capabilities with text, images, and audio.
• Solving LLM Limitations: Learn how to overcome common LLM challenges like stale data and hallucinations using powerful patterns like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to connect to your own documents and Tool Calling to integrate with external APIs.
• Proprietary vs. Open Source Models: Understand the landscape of AI models. We'll discuss how to choose the right one for your job and how to run open-source models locally using tools like Ollama.
• Observability & Evaluation: You'll learn how to monitor your AI applications to track costs and performance, and how to use Spring AI's Evaluator tools to test for factual accuracy and relevance.

Key Takeaways 🏆

By the end of this course, you'll be able to:

• Build practical AI features into your Spring Boot applications.
• Connect LLMs to your own data using the RAG pattern.
• Create AI agents that can use external tools to perform actions.
• Confidently select, test, and monitor AI models for production use.
• Think like an AI engineer, applying best practices to create reliable and intelligent systems.

I can't wait to get this course out to you. Keep an eye on your inbox for the official release announcement!

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