Dan Vega

Spring Security, Office Hours, and Submitting Conference Talks

Good morning friends and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. This past week I posted a new video on Spring Security changes that will affect anyone working on a new Spring Boot 2.7 project or later. There is also a new episode of Spring Office Hours and some changes to the show that we made this week. Finally, I am submitting talks to one of my favorite conferences this week, CodeMash. I thought I would take a little time to give you some tips and tricks I have learned this year about submitting conference talks.

If you follow me or this newsletter you know that I work for VMware. Our big conference, VMware Explore is this week and some members of my team will be there. There are going to be tons of exciting talks and announcements this week in San Francisco and I hope everyone working and attending has a really great time.

I want to wish all of the speakers good luck and I will say a special prayer to the demo gods for all of you. I want to give a special shoutout to my friend DaShaun who will be speaking at the general session this morning. Not that he needs it, he is going to be amazing!

Spring Security without the WebConfigurerAdapter

I am working on a new guide for the Tanzu Developer Center that I will be able to tell you more about in the next edition of this newsletter. It has to do with Spring Security and to be honest I have done a whole lot of work with it over the past year or so. This meant that I needed to brush up on the project and do a little learning last week which is honestly one of my favorite things to do.

In doing so I came across this article on some changes that happened in Spring Security 5.7.0. The WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter is a class that you would extend to configure web security and it was being deprecated. If this was going away how would we write our configuration going forward? This was the question that I had researched and that blog post I mentioned above was my answer.

The video below is a tutorial that walks you through the old way to do it and what you should do going forward.

I’m also trying to experiment with YouTube and one of the things I am trying to do is cut out as much fluff as possible. I feel like I got right to the point in this video and it seems to be doing very well in its first few days. Thank you to everyone who supports my videos and provides feedback. I love doing this and want to get better!

Office Hours

We made a small change a couple of weeks ago and that was to add our personal YouTube channels to the stream. I want to try and attract more viewers to the live stream because one of the main components of the show is answering your questions. If we don’t have viewers we don’t have questions to answer. We got a pretty good turnout and some really great questions in this episode. My hope is with some more consistency we can start to grow those numbers in the near future. We will have a show this week but It will most likely be later this week as DaShaun is San Francisco for VMware Explore.

Conference Call For Papers (CFP)

There are a couple of conferences that I will be submitting proposals to this week and I thought I would take a minute to talk about them. First off I have learned a lot this year about CFPs both as a submitter and a reviewer.

I had the opportunity to be on the selection committee for SpringOne this year and I have a whole new level of respect for everyone who has to review proposals. There were so many great talks submitted and we had so many internal discussions about different titles, abstracts and if it fit the track that they were submitting to.

Through this process and a year of submitting talks (and mostly getting denied) I have learned a lot. I will try and put this into a longer form post at some point but here are my quick tips and tricks.

  • Your title and description need to be exciting: This is your sales pitch and it needs to get the reviewer excited about the topic. Don’t go with “introduction to GraphQL” and expect someone to be excited about that.
  • Humans are reading these proposals: There is no need to stuff keywords or buzz words throughout the abstract. It is most likely being read by a human being and needs to make sense to the person reading it.
  • Provide Outcomes: What are attendees going to get out of your talk? There needs to be a reason and and outcome for attendees to want to signup and attend your talk.

I am submitting talks to CodeMash this week which is one of my favorite conferences right here in Ohio. If you’re on the fence I encourage you to submit a talk and if you want some help reviewing your abstract please let me know. I also found a conference called JavaLand which I have never been to but looks like a great conference so I will submit a few there as well.

There are so many great speakers out there submitting to conferences and it’s really getting competitive. If you submit to a conference and get rejected, keep your head up. The best speakers in our industry are getting rejections and it’s ok. Move on to the next one and enjoy the process.

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✍️ Quote of the week

“Judging a Person Does Not Define Who They Are, It Defines Who You Are.”

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