A Long Spring: 19 Years of Living with Your Past Mistakes • Arjen Poutsma • GOTO 2025
This conversation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph https://gotocph.com Arjen Poutsma - Practical Insights from a Spring Framework Veteran @apoutsma RESOURCES https://bsky.app/profile/poutsma.bsky.social https://fosstodon.org/@poutsma https://github.com/poutsma https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjen-poutsma-288ba6 https://poutsma-principles.com ABSTRACT How do you evolve a framework over nearly two decades without losing the trust of millions of developers? In this talk, I will reflect on 19 years of working on Spring, the Java application framework—from the early days of XML configuration, through the rise of annotations, to the advent of functional programming. I will share the lessons that come not just from designing APIs and writing code, but from practicing open source stewardship over time. That includes how to innovate under constraints, how to evolve APIs responsibly, how to serve a growing community, and why empathy and restraint are essentials skills when it comes to maintaining open source. This talk is for anyone willing to learn from my past mistakes, so they can make entirely new ones. [...] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 02:10 Anecdote: Academic background 04:35 Web controllers 11:37 Anecdote: Bubble sort in Spring MVC 16:16 HTTP clients 20:05 Anecdote: URI methods 23:11 Anecdote: 5 years to fix a mistake 30:07 Closing thoughts 35:58 Outro Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3731 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Rod Johnson • Expert One-On-One J2Ee Design and Development • https://amzn.to/48oCxAJ Thomas Vitale • Cloud Native Spring in Action • https://amzn.to/3kLu1ns Mauricio Salatino • Platform Engineering on Kubernetes • https://amzn.to/3X14qZK Mark Heckler • Spring Boot: Up & Running • https://amzn.to/3c0NK19 Johnson, Höller, Arendsen, Risbert & Sampaleanu • Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework • https://amzn.to/44J4SRb https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #SpringAI #GenAI #JVM #JavaAI #JavaProgramming #Embabel #Programming #TodayInTech #SoftwareEngineering #ArjenPoutsma #GOTO CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech Sign up for updates and specials at https://gotopia.tech/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1