Happy Birthday Claude, Spring TUI and Conference Season is here
Happy Monday friends and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. This was a quieter week on the content front. Last week I traveled to Dallas to visit a customer and it was a quick trip but a really good one. I have been heads-down prepping for what's shaping up to be a packed conference season.
ConFoo in Montreal is just days away, DevNexus is right around the corner after that, and then JavaOne in March. Arc of AI is now on the schedule as well and I'm really looking forward to that one. I've been polishing slides, tweaking demos, and making sure my live coding sessions don't blow up on stage (no promises).
While I do understand some of the anxiety around where we will be as software engineers, I also believe that it is an exciting time to be a developer. I don't think I have ever enjoyed building as much as I do right now. It's a great time to be a Java and Spring developer, and last week my friend and colleague Michael Coté created a video on why he thinks it's a great time to be a Spring dev.
Happy Birthday Claude Code
Claude Code celebrated its first birthday 🥳 over the weekend. It's crazy because I'm heading to ConFoo this week and I will never forget last year's event. I had some time in between talks so I decided to check out this new tool called Claude Code. I probably blew through $20 in credits over a few days but I was amazed at how good it was and how far we had come from generating text in a chat assistant.
It is a little hard to believe just how good this tool and the Anthropic models have gotten in just a year's time, but here we are. I'm excited to see how much more progress we make in the next year!
Spring TUI
While I was in Dallas last week I saw this tweet
announcing TamboUI. This is a framework for building terminal user interfaces (TUI) in Java. My mind immediately went to what problems I can solve with this. I thought about my current workflow of bootstrapping a Spring Boot project using start.spring.io. When I'm done I download it, unzip it and open it up in my terminal. From there I run Claude Code and I begin building.I thought if I could build a Spring Initializr TUI I should be able to improve my workflow and that is exactly what I did. I spent some time on the plane iterating on a plan and by the time I got home I had a PRD to work from. That night and the following morning I was able to knock out an MVP of the Spring TUI. If you find it useful give it a star on GitHub and if you want to learn more check out the video below.
Spring Office Hours
DaShaun and I don't have a new episode from last week to share, but we've got a great one coming up this Monday!
This Week: S5E07 - Copilot CLI and Java SDK with Bruno Borges
On Monday, February 23 at 1:00 PM ET, we're sitting down with Bruno Borges, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft. We'll be diving into the GitHub Copilot CLI and the new Copilot Java SDK, looking at how these tools are turning the terminal into a seriously powerful environment for Spring developers. If you're curious about the next generation of AI-assisted development tooling, you won't want to miss this one.
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
I've got a busy stretch of conferences coming up over the next few weeks. Here's where you can find me:
ConFoo 2026 - Montreal, Canada (February 25-27)
- What's New in Spring Boot 4: A deep dive into the next major release of Spring Boot, covering HTTP interfaces, JSpecify null safety, Jackson 3 integration, and built-in resilience patterns, all with live coding demos.
- Introduction to Spring AI: A practical introduction to bringing generative AI into your Java applications. We'll build chatbots, implement RAG, and explore MCP for AI orchestration.
DevNexus 2026 - Atlanta, GA (March 4-6)
- Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI (Workshop): A hands-on workshop on March 4 where we dig into why mastering the fundamentals still matters even as AI tools reshape our workflows.
- Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI (Talk): The conference talk version covering the same theme: AI tools can boost productivity, but developers still need to master the craft.
- Integrating LLMs in Java: A Practical Guide to Model Context Protocol: Live coding session where we build custom MCP servers in Java and connect them to Claude Desktop and other AI tools.
JavaOne 2026 - San Francisco, CA (March 17-19)
- Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI: Bringing this talk to the JavaOne stage.
- Building and Securing MCP Servers for Java Developers: Learn the building blocks of MCP and how to build, secure, and test your MCP servers in Java.
If you're attending any of these, please come say hi! I love meeting people in person.
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