Preparing for Interviews: Java and Spring Boot Insights

Yesterday, my daughter and I were about to go to Texas Roadhouse. We planned this after our regular Friday evening swim at the Kyle pool. Suddenly, at around 7:20 pm, I received a ping from a senior leader in the company. He asked me to send my 1-pager resume to him. He said he’s looking for a TL for a project in New York. I quickly obliged. After a few minutes, he called and asked me to give him a brief overview of my career profile.

He gave me a heads up that he will be setting up an interview with me and their technical lead. He asked me to brush up on my core Java knowledge as well as Spring Boot.

My head was swirling with questions and to-dos. I’ve been preparing for my PMP certification for weeks now. Do I switch my focus to Java/Spring Boot instead? I am sooo close to getting good scores on my mock exams!

While waiting for our table at Roadhouse, I searched for good resources to do a crash course on Spring Boot. I came across one at Udemy by Ranga. It had good reviews. Roadhouse was so loud but I still managed to listen to the preview. Satisfied with what I saw so far, I went ahead and bought the course.

I’m so glad I did because this course is so easy to follow. It doesn’t give me the “I want to pull my hair” frustrated vibes. Haha. It’s honestly a great course.

Here’s the link: Learn Spring Boot in 100 Steps

Anyway, I have spent almost my entire Saturday taking the training. I spent more than 5 hours watching the videos and also doing the exercises.

Resources/Quick Notes:

• start.spring.io -> makes it so easy to start a Spring project!
• spring-boot-devtools – if change is in pom.xml, need to stop and start server but changes in other files do not need manual restart of server. I wish we have this in our current project!!! This makes it so much easier to redeploy to the server after making small changes to the code. Way better than JRebel!
• Production ready components – actuator makes it so easy to check the health and metrics of the application.
• Also did a review on:
  • functional programming/Lambda expressions
  • Spring JDBC vs JPA vs Spring JPA vs Hibernate. We’re still using Spring JDBC in our project. So, Spring JPA blows my mind. LOL! I really feel like I was trapped in a time capsule while the whole world has moved on.
• I learned a lot today and I feel more confident!