Happy New Year 🎉 2026 Goals and Predictions
Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. I want to wish you all a happy new year. I hope for happiness, health, and success for you and your family in 2026. I'm fresh off some much-needed relaxing in the sun and ready to tackle the new year. I want to tell you a little bit about my goals and what I'll be focused on at the start of the year.
2026 Goals & Predictions
My biggest goals for the new year are staying consistent and creating systems to achieve what I set out to do. One thing I've learned over the years is that you can't accomplish big goals overnight. Consistency is the key, and if you show up regularly, you can accomplish anything. I'm also going to focus on delegating and building systems to support my goals.
YouTube: I've always wanted to hit 100k subscribers on my YouTube channel. I'm proud of what I've built and don't take any metrics for granted, but this is the milestone I want to reach, and 2026 is the year it's going to happen. I also want to focus more on general Java content, so stay tuned for that.
Writing: I love to write. I wrote a book last year, but that's a different kind of writing. I want to write more for myself. I need to figure out a cadence, but my goal is to write at least once a week across my newsletter, articles here, and my other newsletter bytesizedai.dev, which didn't get the attention it deserved.
Speaking: I love traveling to conferences, speaking, and connecting with the community. I'm hoping to attend and speak at 10+ conferences this year and give over 25 talks, including internal ones. I'd also love to attend a couple of conferences I've never been to, so I'll be submitting CFPs to a few new ones this year.
Java, Spring & AI Predictions
If you want to learn about what's happening in the world of Java, Spring, and AI in 2026, check out the first episode of season 5 of the Spring Office Hours Podcast. Hard to believe we've made it to season 5, but here we are!
What I'm Focused On
This week I am preparing for a workshop and talk at CodeMash which is happening next week. I will be there all week, so if you are going to be there, please reach out and let's connect. I will have a bunch of books that we can sign, and I'm excited to hand those out.
I'm excited that I will be presenting at the Java Champions Conference later this month. This conference is free and online and packed with amazing speakers. I will be talking about building and securing MCP servers in Java with Spring AI.
Next month I will be traveling to the great city of Montreal, Canada for ConFoo. I will be giving 2 talks there, one on Spring AI and the other on what's new in Spring Boot 4. I love this conference for the sessions, the people, and the food!
Spring Boot 4
I've been focused on Spring Boot 4 for the last couple of months and will continue this work in the new year. If you missed any of my content, I have a playlist on YouTube covering Spring Boot 4.
In one of those videos (linked below), I built a Spring Boot REST API quickly in response to a comment I received on Twitter. While we built out the REST API fast, I hinted that I wanted to create an entire course on getting started with Spring Boot 4, and the feedback was amazing. I'm going to start putting that course together this month.
Fundamentals of Software Engineering
If you haven't been opening up my emails, I have a new book out, but it doesn't stop there. Nate and I created a new landing page for the book and the podcast we launched. We have recorded 4 episodes so far, and we have been having a lot of fun with it. In the latest episode, we tackle the question on every developer's mind these days: "Will AI replace Software Developers?"
I'm also grateful for this 5-star review we got on the O'Reilly Platform. If you have something nice to say about the book or the podcast, I am looking for quotes I can put on the home page. Feel free to reach out, and I will get it posted.
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