Dan Vega - Spring Developer Advocate, YouTuber and Lifelong Learner

Happy Monday, friends! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and you’re ready to take on a new week. I had a productive week last week where I hosted Tanzu Tuesday, released 2 videos on YouTube, and started working on my presentation for the upcoming SpringOne Tour.

With my new position, I was finally able to create videos on a consistent basis. With consistency, I am seeing an increase in the number of subscribers and watch hours. This is great because that is why I started my YouTube channel, to help people.

With this consistency, I am beginning to be a little bit more critical of my own work. I look around my office and I have all of this amazing equipment and all I can think of is everything that I want to upgrade.

I think this is a natural progression for any content creator. We always look to the creators we aspire to be like and ask “What can I do to produce a video as they do?”. I say this and realize there are probably 1 or 2 YouTubers out there that look up to me. I’m saying this as a reminder to myself and everyone out there... Enjoy the journey and don’t get caught up on the destination.

Tanzu Tuesday: Persistence with Spring Data

I had the opportunity to host Tanzu Tuesday this week. If you’re aware we have a ton of free content including live stream shows and you can find all of this over at the Tanzu Developer Center.

In this episode, I sat down with my cohost DaShaun and our guest Christoph Strobl. Christoph is on the Spring Data team and talked to us about what Spring Data is and what’s coming next. I selfishly love being a host on these shows because I always learn something and this week was no different. I learned that you can create Data projections using DTOs & Interfaces and the resulting SQL will only select the properties you define which can lead to increased performance.

Spring Data List Crud Repository

Before we interviewed Christoph I had a chance to put together a video on a new feature coming in Spring Data 3.0. In the current version of Spring Data when you want to retrieve a collection of things the Crud Repository will return an Iterable. In most cases, we are used to working with a List and the List Crud Repository addresses that.

Spring Boot + Notion API

If you aren’t new around here you know that I am a huge fan of Notion. In fact, I’m writing this very newsletter in Notion and I use it for so many things in my personal and professional life. In this video, I will show you a Notion database that I created to manage my upcoming talks. We will then use Spring Boot to talk to the Notion API to retrieve those rows. If you’re a fan of Spring and Notion you’re going to enjoy this one!

Courses

I spent some time coming up with a plan for my current courses and any new courses I want to create going forward. First off if you didn’t know I used to self host my courses on Teachable and you could purchase them through my website.

I turned that off last year because I didn’t want to have to maintain courses in 2 different places and honestly I wasn’t selling anything there. You need to have a large audience or a good marketing strategy to sell on your own platform and I don’t have either.

All of my courses on Udemy and I went through and cleaned some things up there. First off I unpublished a course I did with my friend John Thompson titled “Angular for Java Developers”. This course has fallen way behind and I just don’t have the time or the knowledge to bring it up to date.

I also sent out some emails to anyone in my Spring or Groovy courses. If you are in any of my courses, check your email. I was basically asking for suggestions on how I could update current courses without completing overhauling them.

I'm throwing out the idea of releasing a bunch of shorter (1 hr), more focused courses instead of one new mega course. The analytics show that students rarely go through a 14-hour course. Just like you, I purchase a course to learn about one or two things.

I think this will help with a couple of things. First, these shorter more focused courses will be easier to update in the future. It's very hard to keep a course that spans 14 hours in length up to date with the latest and greatest features. Second, this will give students a targeted curriculum to learn those one or two concepts in detail. I think this is a win-win for everyone but I would like to hear what you think.

Around the Web

📝 Articles

🎬 Videos

🎙 Podcasts

Until Next Week

Thanks for sitting down and sharing a cup of coffee with me my friend. I hope you enjoyed this installment of Coffee & Code and I will see you next Monday morning. If you have any links you would like me to include please contact me and I might add them to a future newsletter. I hope you have a great week and as always friends...

Happy Coding
Dan Vega
danvega@gmail.com
https://www.danvega.dev