Sebastian and Márton chat with Rod Johnson, the creator of the Spring Framework. Rod tells the story of how Spring was born more than two decades ago, and shares his recent journey of coming back to the JVM and discovering all the fun of being a newcomer to Kotlin.

Resources:

Hosts:

Sebastian Aigner – Website | Bluesky
Márton Braun – Website | Bluesky

Guest:

Rod Johnson – Twitter | LinkedIn

Timeline:
(0:00) Intro
(0:52) The origins of Spring
(6:40) You need a business model
(8:21) Consistency is key
(9:39) Sustainable open source
(14:22) Parallels with JetBrains and Kotlin
(15:29) Rod’s journey around the JVM
(20:48) Shoulders of giants
(22:34) The newcomer experience
(24:40) LLMs write great Kotlin
(30:34) “You can start without great pain”
(33:32) Extension functions
(36:15) Too much magic?
(37:56) Rod’s feature wishlist
(39:37) Versioning and compatibility
(41:19) Ecosystems and interop
(43:34) Kotlin type system evolution
(46:27) Kotlin with Spring
(52:24) Learning Spring with Kotlin
(54:46) Kotlin in 5 years?
(1:00:39) Rod’s current work
(1:03:58) Wrap-up

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