Hi, Spring fans! Happy New Year! As we step into 2024, full of hope and enthusiasm, welcome to the first installment of This Week in Spring. It's a time for new beginnings and resolutions, and what better way to start than by exploring the ever-evolving world of Spring? I hope your new year celebrations were both fun and memorable, marking the start of a year filled with learning, growth, and innovation in our field.

• This blog looks at the fantastic Spring Modulith project and how it can be used to improve modular applications with Spring.
• The post we just looked at eventually landed on Reddit and prompted a great question about why and how Spring Modulith's event bus helps promote modularity, to which Spring Modulith lead Oliver Drotbohm wrote a must-read reply.
• Speaking of Spring Modulith, to celebrate the new year, I looked at Spring's ApplicationEvent subsystem in this installment of Spring Tips.
• An interesting read on the Data Transfer Object pattern and different ways - manual DTO creation, ModelMapper, and Lombok - to create them in a Spring Boot application.
• This post is an interesting discussion of some of the best practices for working with Spring Boot and Docker.
• On last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Trifork CTO Joris Kuipers.
• I know that this is this week's installment of This Week in Spring, but I hope you read last week's This Year in Spring in which I looked at the defining technologies of 2024.
• I love this post from MariaDB on the fantastic implications of using virtual threads with MariaDB's JDBC Driver.

You know what else? This week marks 13 years since I wrote the first installment of This Week in Spring in the first week of January 2011. It's been a ton of fun chronicling the community with y'all, and I am grateful for your weekly collaboration, blog posts, and more. Here's to another 13 years!

As we embark on this exciting journey through 2024, let's continue to grow, innovate, and contribute to the vibrant Spring community. Here's to a year of learning, sharing, and creating outstanding software together! Happy coding!