The Spring Documentary, Montreal Adventures and Building Better Monoliths

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. I was up in Montreal with Josh, DaShaun, and Adib for the Spring One Tour, and it was an incredible time. I got to deliver a 4-hour workshop on Spring AI (yes, four hours, and honestly I could have kept going) and gave a talk on what's new in Spring Boot 4. There's something special about getting some of the team together in person and spending time with the community. There are just some things Zoom calls can't replace, and the energy and attention you get from an audience is one of them. If you were there, it was great meeting you!

Back at home, I've been heads-down on Spring Modulith content, a topic that clearly resonated with a lot of you based on the response I got on social media. Let's get into it.

Spring Documentary

The Spring Documentary is now live, and wow was it amazing. The folks at CultRepo do an amazing job with their documentaries, and this one really hit home. It was great seeing the history of Spring through the lens of the people that helped shape this amazing framework, ecosystem, and community.

Video Recaps

Introduction to Spring Modulith

If you've ever started with a clean, well-organized monolith only to watch it slowly devolve into a big ball of mud, this one's for you. In this video, I walk through Spring Modulith from the ground up: what it is, why it exists, and how it helps you build domain-driven modules inside a single Spring Boot application.

The walkthrough is hands-on. I built a repo where each Git branch represents a step in the journey from a traditional monolith to a modular monolith with decoupled, durable events. You'll see how Spring Modulith enforces module boundaries, verifies your architecture with tests, and lets you publish application events that can survive restarts.

This was one of my most popular tweets this week, and for good reason. Modular monoliths hit that sweet spot where you get the simplicity of a single deployment with the structure you'd expect from a well-designed system. If you're not ready for microservices (or you've realized you never needed them), Spring Modulith is worth your time. Speaking of which, Spring Modulith 2.1 RC1, 2.0.6, and 1.4.11 were just released, so the project continues to move forward at a great pace.

DevNexus 2026 - Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI - Nathaniel Schutta & Dan Vega

The recording from our talk at DevNexus is now available. We like to think of this as a mini therapy session on where we are in our industry right now. If you need a quick pep talk, check out the video below. Sit back, take a deep breath, and relax — everything is going to be okay!

Podcasts

We had a couple of great episodes on Spring Office Hours over the past few weeks. First, we published our Community Potluck (S05E13) on April 21st, which is always a fun format where we dig into questions and topics from the community.

Then on May 4th, we had Simon Martinelli on the show (S5E14) to talk about Spec Driven Development. Simon had a lot of practical insight into designing your API contract first and letting that drive your implementation. It's an approach that pairs really well with how I think about building Spring Boot applications.

This week, DaShaun and I are recording S5E16: Upgrading Spring and OSS Security. This is a topic that affects every single one of us. Whether you're trying to get off an older version of Spring Boot or you're thinking about the security of the open-source dependencies in your project, we'll be digging into all of it. Tune in live or catch the replay here.

On the podcast front, I also published two new episodes of Fundamentals of Software Engineering with Nate Schutta. The first, Why Software Engineering Fundamentals Matter More in the Age of AI, tackles something I feel strongly about: as AI tools write more code for us, understanding the fundamentals becomes more important, not less. The second episode, Why We Hate Legacy Code (and How to Work With It Anyway), is a conversation I think every developer can relate to. We've all inherited that codebase. The question is what you do next.

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