Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring, a weekly roundup where I get to swim through the great content in the ecosystem and learn things and hopefully share interesting tidbits with you all. I mark my calendar by the number of This Week in Springs, so imagine my elation to realize looking at the calendar that we're really close to the epic SpringOne Platform 2019! I can't believe it!

The event takes place soon - October 7–10, 2019 - in Austin, Texas. That's just around the corner, but I've still got a few places to get to. I'm in Madrid, Spain, for the epic CodeMotion Madrid show. Then it's off to Guadalajara, Mexico for the Java day Mexico show; and then it's off to Taipei, Taiwan for the JCConf lead by the Taiwan JUG. Then, finally, it's off to the land of BBQ and Spring, SpringOne Platform! I can't wait to see you all there.

(Hopefully, by then, I'll have another chapter in my book Reactive Spring!)

We've nary an instant to tarry: let's get to it!

• Java 13 was released! Multiline strings, improved performance, a majorly rewrittern Socket API, and so much more. Get the bits now! If you're on macOS, and have the venerable sdkman installed, you can also use sdk install java 13.0.0-open.
• As we welcome Java 13, A Bootiful Podcast: Nicolai Parlog on Java Modularity
• Spring Tools 4.4.0 released
• The Spanner-inspired Yugabyte DB just shipped their 2.0 release and there's even a Spring Data module and they're working on R2DBC support-nice!
• I love this story of the path of a contribution to the Spring Data MongoDB documentation
• Software Engineering Radio interviewed me for their podcast in episode 381 on Spring Boot
• Heads-up from Spring Data lead Mark Paluch: we're preparing a @R2DBC 0.8.0.RC1 release for late next week. Follow GitHub milestones for our release schedule
• I love this post from Netifi on the differences between gRPC and RSocket - Netifi - Medium
• It was a lot of fun being in the Oracle CodeOne community keynote last week.
• A nice article on using Reactor Blockhound to find the code that's blocking threads
• The ingenious Toshiaki Maki has added support for 8-bit ASCII art to Spring Boot. So, you're upgrading, right?
• Did you know that, in addition to the recently added Dark Mode on the Spring Initializr, there's also a way to "share" a configuration so that others can click the link and get the same configuration?