Hi, Spring fans! How're you doing? I hope you're doing well. You know, I've been thinking a lot about how to retain that zen-like peace that comes with a vacation spent on the beach. I got back from Hawaii eight days ago and I found it to be so very beautiful. Nature really sold it for me; the fresh air is everything. If you don't have ready access to nature - if you, like me, are in a giant city with the ongoing sound of car horns ("klaxons"), fire engines, traffic, and everything else that accompanies any big city - then may I invite you to breathe with me?

Just sit still for 30 seconds. Focus on these words. Inhale. Take a big, deep breath, and then hold it in for a few seconds. Then exhale. When was the last time you did that? I don't do that nearly enough. If I spend 30 or 60 seconds breathing, it gives me a chance to reset. To close the mental browser tabs of my mind. I suppose that something like this, or better, is what people get out of meditation. I should revisit yoga. Anyway, I hope you too have purged your mental RAM and are ready for a wonderful week's review. There's a ton of stuff to get to so let's dive right in!

• Spring Tips: Better Data-Driven Applications with Spring Boot and Redis
• In last week's A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Microsoft's Sean Li on Azure, Spring Boot, Azure Spring Cloud, Spring integrations and more
• Check out this A Japanese-language introduction to Spring GraphQL
• A common Pitfall of Spring Boot's RestTemplate
• Create a Data Marvel with Spring Data Neo4j
• Kai Tödter has released 1.0.0 of his HAL Explorer project: check it out!
• Observing the Reliability of your Java Apps and Services with Spring Boot, Micrometer, Prometheus & Reliably
• The Java developer experience on Azure with Visual Studio Code
• The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2021 has a lot of good news for Java developers. Check it out!
• Everybody, the completely rebooted Confluent Developer portal is now live! There are tons of great resources for Spring and Kafka developers.