The Road Show: ConFoo, DevNexus, and On to JavaOne
Hey friends, it's been a couple of weeks since my last newsletter, and I owe you an update. The reason for the silence? I've been on the road. Back-to-back conference trips to ConFoo and DevNexus kept me busy, and I'm finally home, catching my breath, and ready to fill you in on everything. No new videos this week, but I've got plenty to share about the conference experience and what's coming next.
I was a guest on The Ready, Test Go Podcast a couple of months ago, and I was excited to see that this episode was published. It was really fun talking with David about all things Cleveland, AI, Java, and more. If you want to watch the video version or find out more about the episode, you can go here.
I mentioned this in a previous newsletter, but I recently built a terminal UI for scaffolding Spring Boot projects. This was powered by the Spring Initializr and built with TamboUI, a declarative Java TUI framework. It has been a lot of fun not only to build, but I use it every single day. I was excited to check this morning and find out it already has 114 stars!
Conference Season
ConFoo
I had a great time at ConFoo up in Montreal. If you've never been, it's a multi-technology conference that draws a really diverse crowd of developers. What I love about ConFoo is that you end up in conversations with people who work in completely different ecosystems, and you always walk away with fresh perspectives. I gave my talks, had some fantastic hallway conversations, and got to connect with developers I've only ever interacted with online. Montreal in winter is cold, but the conference energy more than makes up for it.
One thing ConFoo does about as well as any conference I've ever been to is getting speakers feedback on their sessions really fast. I like this because while I'm in the moment, it's nice to hear what people thought of the session.
DevNexus
Right on the heels of ConFoo, I headed to DevNexus in Atlanta. DevNexus is one of the largest Java conferences in North America, and the Java community always shows up strong. The talks were excellent, the conversations were even better, and it was awesome to see so many familiar faces from the Spring community. If you were there and we got to chat, thanks for saying hello. These in-person events remind me why I love this community so much.
My friend Nate Schutta and I did an 8-hour workshop on The Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI. I thought it was awesome and it ended up being a nice little therapy session for all of us. I think we all need some time to talk and process what's going on in our industry right now. We also did a 1-hour version of this and were amazed to see that it turned out to be standing room only.
We also had a book signing at the VMware Tanzu Booth, which was a lot of fun. We ended up giving away about 30 books and I want to thank everyone who made this possible.
Being at two conferences in quick succession is tiring, but it's the kind of tired where you come home full of ideas and motivation. I've got a bunch of content ideas from questions people asked me at both events, so stay tuned for those in the coming weeks.
Spring Office Hours
Before I hit the road, we recorded a DevNexus preview episode with Glenn Renfro on Spring Office Hours. If you missed it, you can catch the replay below. Glenn is always a great guest, and we talked about what to expect at DevNexus and some of the Spring-related sessions on the schedule. Now that DevNexus is behind us, I'm looking forward to doing a recap soon.
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
The conference train doesn't stop. Next week I'm heading to San Francisco for JavaOne 2026 (March 17-19), and I'm giving two talks:
Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI: Agentic coding assistants and AI chat interfaces are changing how we work, and some people are saying software engineering is dead. I don't buy it. In this talk, I'll make the case that the fundamentals of our craft matter more than ever. AI tools can boost productivity, but you still need to understand what you're building and why.
Building and Securing MCP Servers for Java Developers: The Model Context Protocol is quickly becoming the standard for how AI applications connect with external systems and data. In this session, I'll walk through the building blocks of MCP and show you how to build, secure, and test MCP servers in Java. If you're thinking about how AI fits into your enterprise architecture, this one's for you.
If you're going to be at JavaOne, come find me and say hi. I'd love to meet you in person.
In the News
Introducing GPT-5.4
OpenAI released GPT-5.4, the latest in the GPT-5 family of models.
Dan's Thoughts: The GPT-5 models are really good. I haven't pushed this one enough to notice a major difference yet, but initial impressions are positive. I'll report back once I've spent more time with it in my day-to-day workflows.
NotebookLM Adds Video Overviews
Google's NotebookLM now supports video overviews, expanding beyond its popular audio summary feature.
Dan's Thoughts: I'm a huge fan of NotebookLM and I'm looking forward to giving this a try. The audio overviews were already a game-changer for digesting long documents and research. Adding video takes it to another level. Have you used it yet? I'd love to hear what you think.
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