Skyrocket Developer Productivity with Spring Boot & IntelliJ IDEA

Java and Spring Boot continue to be the dominant technologies in enterprise software development. IntelliJ IDEA remains the preferred IDE of choice for JVM application developers, offering rich tooling and deep framework integration. The powerful combination of Spring Boot and IntelliJ IDEA can significantly improve developer productivity and reduce development friction.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn how to build Spring Boot applications by leveraging IntelliJ IDEA's capabilities.

Through practical examples and guided exercises, we’ll explore:
* Streamlined local development using Testcontainers and Docker Compose
* Building robust, data-centric applications with Spring Data
* Managing database schema changes using Flyway and Liquibase
* Designing maintainable architectures with Spring Modulith for modular monoliths
* Advanced debugging techniques with Spring Debugger

By the end of the session, attendees will be able to incorporate these productivity tips into their day-to-day work and experience the improved developer productivity.

Architecting Software without OverEngineering

Modern software systems often suffer not from lack of design, but from excessive and premature abstraction. This talk explores a pragmatic approach to software architecture that emphasizes simplicity, clarity, and evolutionary design over speculative complexity.

1. Structure by Feature, Not Layers: Organize code using package-by-feature to improve cohesion and align the codebase with business capabilities, instead of scattering logic across technical layers.

2. Enforce Modularity Pragmatically: Use tools like Spring Modulith and ArchUnit to define and enforce module boundaries, preventing architectural drift while keeping the benefits of a monolith.

3. Apply DDD Where It Adds Value: Focus on understanding the domain and apply Domain-Driven Design principles selectively, avoiding unnecessary complexity from overusing tactical patterns.

4. Avoid Designing for Hypothetical Problems: Resist the urge to overengineer for scale or flexibility you don’t yet need and defer decisions until real requirements emerge.

Attendees will gain practical strategies to design clean, maintainable systems without falling into the trap of overengineering.

Target Audience: Developers, Tech Leads, Architects
Preferred Session Duration: 1 hour

Infusing AI into Spring Boot Applications with Spring AI

Instead of working through rigid user interfaces, what if we could simply interact with the system using natural language?

In this session, we’ll explore how to transform traditional Spring Boot applications into intelligent, conversational systems by integrating AI capabilities using Spring AI.

In this session, you will learn how to:

- Interact with the system using natural language leveraging LLMs behind the scenes
- Maintain conversational context across interactions using Chat Memory
- Generate Structured Outputs from LLMs that can seamlessly integrate with your domain models
- Use Embedding Models and Vector databases to enable semantic search, similarity matching, and contextual understanding
- Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to augment LLMs with external knowledge sources to produce accurate, and context-rich responses
- Leverage MCP to enable LLMs interact with external systems

By the end of this session, you’ll gain a clear, practical understanding of how to leverage Spring AI in your Spring Boot applications. You’ll understand the patterns and approaches to build systems that are not just functional, but intelligent, adaptive, and more user-friendly.

- Basic understanding of Spring Boot
- Target audience: Developers, and Architects
- Preferred session duration: 1 hour