What's your Spring journey?

Maciej Walkowiak — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:28:05 +0000

Hello! Since this place is all about the community, I'd like to get to know you better.

What's your story? How did that happen that out so many programming languages, frameworks, software stack you chose to work with Spring (and I assume Java)? How did your career developed?

Share your journey! 🙂

I'll start:

In 2006, during my 3rd year of university, a local company organised a program for students, where students led by company employees build a real life software in a company-like setup - team structure, tools and frameworks like ones used in real-life projects etc.
We were meant to build a website, mobile app and an API for posting photos online when interesting things happen in the city. Server side in Java, mobile app - as we are in pre-iPhone era - as far as I remember was meant to run on Symbian.

I picked up "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel and started reading Spring Framework and Hibernate reference documentation. At that time, there were almost no tutorials, no getting started guides, nothing like that. I remember the beginnings were difficult.

We managed to finish the project, it wasn't popular at all but this was also not the intention. Me and my friend proved that we can write code, learn and suffer and this was apparently good enough to hire us.

I started my first job as a Java Developer on the 7th of May 2007. Since then, I have worked with ~10 companies on short and longer customer projects, contributed to several Spring projects, spoke few times at conferences, met many wonderful people from the Spring community and the Spring team - either online on Twitter or in real life.

I quickly realised that specialising in Java & Spring gives very good and well paid job opportunities for both permanent and contract positions.
Even though I tried few other programming languages, I like to express myself the most in Java (or Kotlin). I've always believed that Java & Spring is a great foundation for enterprise software or software with complex domains. And most importantly - I find coding with Spring fun and the Spring community is fantastic.

During the 17 years of my career Spring has always been at the center and most certainly will remain there for the next decade.

(I've shortened this story several times to make it easily digestable, but I can get into details if anyone is interested 😉)

Spring Builders: Maciej Walkowiak

What's your Spring journey?