I created this for a presentation about my experience and skills and I thought it belongs here.

The word cloud above covers all my 11 years of development so far and clearly reveals which topics I am best at. Although I always wished myself to become an agnostic developer, also known as a polyglot developer, after all these years I have to accept the fact that Java & Spring are clearly my strongest points.

Where should I go from now? Well… I have considered learning Kotlin for a while. ;)

Having finished writing my third Spring book, it was about time I should start writing technical posts as well. Being an accessible online person, quite a few people that read my books find mistakes or have interesting questions. I am really happy when people find mistakes, this means that they are actually reading the books, taking them seriously, including reading the references to the official documentation, which is more on point and more detailed than a book written by an “external” will ever be.

And I am happier when questions that question my own understanding of the framework are risen as well. Because this motivates me to dig deep into the documentation, to ask other technical people I know what their opinion is. It is an opportunity for communication and debate.

The last question I had from a reader was about the @Configuration annotation. He asked why is this annotation not mentioned as being a stereotype annotation in the book and if this is not a mistake on my part. He gave me some links to some official documentation and his opinion about the matter. After I queried multiple resources, including my technical reviewer, who is a Spring trainer for Pivotal this is the answer I came up with.Continue reading “Spring Stereotype Annotations”

In case you do not know I wrote a technical book, about Spring Web. From time to time, I receive emails from people reading my book and working with the code, but the email received tonight made my day:

What attracted me to your Pivotal Certified Spring Web Application Developer Exam Guide is the fact that you used Java configuration for the Spring Web Flow, and to the best of my knowledge, that is the only book in the market that currently used Java Config for Spring Web Flow. As I look further into the book I see how you encouraged the use of current and most prevalent tools for development. I love your approach, it is very upwards looking, and has the tendency of yielding a great and lasting result.(That’s what Tim said)

So yeah, I’m a pioneer in using Java Config for Spring Web Flow. Ta da! So in case you had doubts about buying my book, I hope there are less of them now.

While growing up I had a little sister, 4 years smaller than me. I hated taking care of her and my parents insisted I did that since she was 2 years old. I think the reason why I hated her was because of the feeling that I was not enough. If I were, why did my parent have to have another child? I have no idea where that feeling came from, I did not just start feeling like that on my own. It must have been something my parents did or said. Years later though she is still the favorite.

The weird thing is that my sister is old now. Until last year, we haven’t see each other in almost 10 years. But that feeling of not being enough has followed me. I never felt good enough during faculty. I never felt good enough in the relationships I was involved.

Sometimes I think I am not even good enough for my cat, because I do not spend enough time with it. Because I clean its littler only every two days.

I do not feel enough for my friends, I feel like I don’t deserve them. I do not feel good enough for the position I am occupying at my job. I always have this feeling at the back of my head someday, some people will realize what I already know and they will fire me.

I do not know how to get rid of this feeling. And maybe I shouldn’t. Becasue the feeling of not being good enough, although it makes me bitterly sad, it also make me push myself over my limits trying to be better than I am.

I felt that I was not good enough to write a technical book and that the book is not good enough to worth buying. I was actually happy when I found the pdf on some torrent sites and on some pirate library sites where it could be downloaded for free, because in my mind, it was good enough to worth pirating. It was something. But staring at the payment notification that I received from Apress, I feel conflicted. The books was actually sold, and I received the first payment from selling the book. I am still staring at that email and I can’t believe it.

Whoever you are, the people that made this happen, I thank you very much! I will continue writing technical books and I promise to improve my writing based on your feedback!

PS: The video has nothing to do with the book. I just like Switchfoot a lot and I was listening to this while writing the post. It sort of fit. Enjoy!
Stay safe, stay happy!

After that I read Spring in Action, then the Spring reference and everywhere when given an example on how to use jdbcTemplate, the instance was created and injected like that.

And I am confused. If jdbcTemplate instance is thread-safe once configured, is recommended to not create one for each use and is stateless (does not maintain any conversational state) why don’t we just create it as a singleton bean and use it as such?
Sample of my code: