About John Thompson

Hi. I’m John.

I’ve been in the IT industry for over 28 years. Today, I specialize mainly in Java, the most successful and widely known programming language in use today. I also specialize in the Spring Framework, which is the most popular open source application framework for building enterprise class applications on the Java platform.

Why Build This Site?

Every day I get contacted by recruiters looking for people with Java skills. Sometimes 5 to 6 times day. These are often very good paying jobs, yet there is still a shortage of good people in software development. Positions paying $60 per hour are going unfilled because there are not enough people writing Java. These are positions I turn away, because the pay is well below my market rate.

Malcolm Gladwell claims it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. That’s 5 years, 40 hours a week. I’ve certainly put in the time and I’ve had the opportunity to learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry.  I can definitely claim to be an expert.

Through this site, I hope to leverage my years of experience to accelerate your learning of the Spring Framework. I’m not going to lie to you, its a big framework. The environment for enterprise Java is even bigger. If you’re new to Java, you have a lot to learn. I hope through the content on this web site I can accelerate your education of the Java and Spring landscape.

More Fun Facts

• Founder at Jember AI
• Chief Security Officer at Kompliant, led SOC 2 Compliance Effort
• Senior Developer at Velo Payments – building the next generation payments platform (in Spring of course!)
• Worked as a Spring Source consultant for Pivotal for about 2 years.
• Used the Spring Framework to help build Visa Checkout.
• Occasionally moonlights as an Oracle DBA. (Not an expert, but I do know enough to be dangerous!)
• Once traded coding work for a pair of ocean kayaks from Boat US.
• Wrote a mobile app in Grails to track Pub-Golf Scores – just for fun

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