October: Conference Season, New Online Course, Faster Spring Boot Builds 🍃

Conference Season & Agentic Spring Boot Testing Course 🤖

🎤 Conference Tour Through Europe

October was a packed month on the road – with plenty of new faces and fresh perspectives:

• Devoxx Belgium: My three-hour deep dive Prompt It Right: Spring Boot Testing in the AI Era is now on YouTube.
• JavaCro: A lovely conference in a hotel on a small Croatian island, with an activity every evening. Highly recommended – I'm already planning to return next year!
• TestCon Europe (Vilnius): A QA-centric crowd and two talks – "The Need for Speed: Cut Your Spring Boot Test Suite Duration by 70%" and "Top 5 Spring Boot Testing Mistakes Developers Fall Into".

My biggest takeaway: AI and testing are becoming more intertwined every month.

🚀 Agentic Spring Boot Testing Is Now Live

• My workflow: How I use coding agents to test Spring Boot applications day to day.
• Years of experience, encoded: Seven agent skills that teach your agent to pick the right test type.
• Tests that prove something: Best practices to keep AI-generated tests meaningful and maintainable.

⚡ Spring Test Profiler Got Simpler

• Zero configuration: No more custom META-INF files. Add the dependency, run your tests, done.
• JSON report: A flat results.json (contexts created, cache hit ratio, context creation time) for CI checks and dashboards. Pin your expected context count and fail the build when it regresses.
• In the works: An ArchUnit-like test that fails when your project exceeds a set number of contexts – keeping your build time stable.

🇳🇱 J-Fall 2026: See You in the Netherlands

• I'll be at J-Fall on November 12th.
• My talk: "The Spring Test Profiler: Cut Down Your Test Execution Time by 70%" (timetable).
• If you're attending, come say hi!

Noteworthy Content

• How to Keep Enjoying Programming in a World of LLMs by Manuel Bärenz – A thoughtful take on staying motivated as AI changes our craft.
• Making Sense of Vector Databases by Balkrishna Rawool – Finally understand how RAG works, once and for all.
• Kill All Mutants! Intro to Mutation Testing by Dave Aronson – A great starting point to measure how good your tests really are.
• Architecture Observability and Guardrails by Victor Rentea – Practical ways to keep your architecture in check.

Outlook for Next Month