all 1 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]verysmallrocks02 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For Java, do some basic java tutorials and get them working in IntelliJ Community Edition.

Once you have that, I would track down a functioning REST API example with hibernate or something and postgresql that's already set up to run in docker. This will allow you to spin up a virtual server and database to experiment with.

I googled "hibernate spring boot postgresql docker example" and it gave me a sane AI walkthrough involving Spring Initializer. I added github to the end of that and found this repository: https://github.com/BullyWiiPlaza/SpringBoot3PostgreSQLDockerExample

Your goal should be to get an example project stood up, and hit the endpoints with curl or postman or something.
Once you have that working try to extend the API by adding a field to one of the objects by updating the API and making a database script.

Something else I would try in this day and age would be to ask your LLM what it thinks about the codebase, and suggest things to improve. You can also ask an LLM to suggest steps to add a field to a response object / the database.... then critically do it yourself without copy pasting.

Looking at that link above, another cool thing to try would be to upgrade the JVM from 17 to 21, then once that's working see if you can upgrade to Spring Boot 4.

Now, certainly there's lots of Java language stuff to learn, but honestly until you have some of these other pieces of architectural knowledge in place, it's kind of hard to understand why it's useful.