Thank you, Spring!

Greg L. Turnquist
5 min readMar 27, 2024

14 years ago, a young coder with a wife and a baby girl, left his comfy, secure position and struck out to join the recently acquired Spring team. That someone was me.

My daughter’s reaction when I told here I was joining the Spring team!

I had never worked on such an elite team. I had been used to writing functioning code and shipping it out to our users. Of course I’d had feedback on proposed solutions and seen my handiwork reviewed to see if it was correct. But I’d never submitted code that was then “polished”.

I’d never done that before.

But here I was working for a team that was serving literally millions while my previous system’s users clocked in at less than 1000.

There was some awe being able to claim

I was part of this fantastic team. But there a much bigger dose of panic I was trying hold at bay!

And so I did my best to just listen to the feedback I received.

The Spring team is somewhat famous for “juergenization”. Some call it polishing. But that’s an oversimplification.

You see, the idea is to polish your code such that Juergen Hoeller (Spring founder and present lead developer of the Spring Framework) would approve your changes. Invariably, he would make a slight tweak…or a veritable rewrite (assuming your patch qualified) and make your code appear as if it had been there the whole time.

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Greg L. Turnquist

Sr. Staff Technical Content Engineer at CockroachDB • YouTube Content Creator at https://youtube.com/@ProCoderIO • Best-Selling Author • Coffee Lover