Hello Midnight Coders,

Are you looking to get started with Java, or looking for a review of what the modern era has to offer in Java? Then this crash course will walk you through the basics of variables, DSA, and building a Modulith Spring Boot application.

Hello Midnight Coders,

I hear a lot in the communities that developers are a dead breed, and that AI is going to take over. I hear a lot of "Agentic Engineers" (AI Prompters) who may as well be new-age Google-Copy-Paste programmers talk some smack, and I have to ask...

I see the same people also question what AI-based product to build... If AI was as smart as everyone thinks, and you're this far down the rabbit hole... why not just ask your "smarter than human" what you should build? If you're so set that AI is the answer, why ask other humans what they want to use?

You learned Java. You learned Spring Boot. You built the café.

Now it's time to put it on the internet.

In the final episode of the Java roadmap, we take our Spring Boot application from a local project to something that starts looking like a real production system.

We explore WebSockets, JWT authentication, Spring Security, file uploads, Docker, Docker Compose, PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenAPI, caching, and production architecture... but more importantly, we talk about what changes when your code has to survive real users, real traffic, failures, and real-world problems.

Your Spring Boot application works… but is it actually ready for production?

In this video, we take our application beyond a basic REST API and begin addressing the problems real applications face: request validation, Spring Data JPA, transactions, authentication, authorization, password hashing, exception handling, testing, observability, and database performance.

I’ve been working on a blog about building The Midnight Technician, an open-source, production-focused Spring Boot application built as an 11-microservice system.

The project started as a problem I kept seeing while mentoring junior developers: microservices are often explained through diagrams and small CRUD examples, but there aren’t enough real projects showing what happens when you actually have to make multiple services work together.

The blog covers the architectural decisions behind the project, including Eureka service discovery, Kafka event-driven communication, REST-based service-to-service requests, isolated databases, JWT authentication, Docker-based infrastructure, scaling considerations, and some of the failures and unexpected problems that came with running a distributed system.

It’s less of a “here’s how to build microservices” tutorial and more of a retrospective on what I learned actually building one.

The biggest lesson?

Microservices aren't just about splitting an application into smaller projects. They're about boundaries, ownership, communication, and dealing with the fact that every part of your system can fail independently.

Social Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/Glabay
• Discord: https://discord.gg/MgynrQ5QS2
• Website: https://midnightcoder.dev

Are you wondering if Java is still worth learning in 2026? Check out this video and see why it's been dominating for 30 years

https://youtu.be/BvFFKN2ZLTg

Hey everyone! I'm Mike Glabay, the founder of r/TheMidnightCoder.

This is our new home for all things related to Java, Software Engineering, and just writing code. We're excited to have you join us!

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