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This Month in Spring – January 2021

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to the first installment of This Month in Spring in the new year! Happy belated new year to you all! It is late January, 2021, as I write this. That means that, first of all, Chinese New Year will soon be here, but also it means that my personal favorite season, Spring, is not too far away, either!

It's been a minute since we last chatted, you and me, dear reader, and there's been a ton of stuff a shaking in that interval which means we've got a lot to cover and oh-so-little time in which to do it. So, without further ado…

We start our recap with my annual look back at the year that was with This Year in Spring.

And with that out of the way, let's review some of the stuff that piqued my curiosity this last very busy month or so.

Even thought it was the holidays and the end of the year, I found the last month to be as invigorating as any. I spent time on a fun two-hour panel hosted by the Barcelona JUG (who run the JBCN conference, among other things) talking about all sorts of things including GraalVM native images, new features in the Java language, cloud-native applications, and so much more. I delivered 22 presentations publicly and for customers in geographies all around the world. I got several episodes of the podcast out.

I also marked a decade of This Week in Spring with the first installment of 2021. I started the weekly This Week in Spring roundup after a fun discussion over the holiday with the legendarily nice guy and SpringSource co-founder Keith Donald in late 2010. Lo, the first week of January 2011, the first edition of this roundup went out the door on the old SpringSource.org blog.

It's been so much fun putting together this roundup, without fail, every Tuesday for the last decade. You wouldn't believe the lengths to which I went to get this out on Tuesday, well, my Tuesday, no matter where I was. I'd be on planes all the time and the original blog software on SpringSource.org didn't support scheduling posts, so I'd either publish it a little early or – if I was going to be on a plane for the entirety of the useful day – I'd have my then manager Adam Fitzgerald post it for me. He reviewed the content for the first few years of the blog, too. What a legend that guy is. I learned a ton (about everything really, but also writing in particular) working with him. Nowadays, most flights longer than an hour or two have wi-fi onboard; but not so back then. Nowadays the software we use to blog – custom, open-source software that we built with Spring back in 2013 that underpins the spring.io) experience – supports scheduled posts, as well, so it's much easier to get this post out on time.

This Week in Spring has two other variants. This Month in Spring is an email digest that goes out once a month (which you're reading now); go to the blog page and find the Get the Spring Newsletter sign up form to get that digest. This Year in Spring goes out as the last post of any given year, right here on the blog.

I love this roundup because it's a constant, and much appreciated, reminder of just how vibrant this community is. Thank you, as usual, Spring fans, and here's to another decade (at least) of This Week in Spring!

Oh, one more thing: you'll note that the roundup includes a bunch of blogs that start with YMNNALFT, short for You May Not Need a Library For That. In these blogs, I look at hidden gems that support your work in the Spring ecosystem and that might just spare you an extra, redundant dependency and the implied complexity such a dependency adds to the codebases.

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