I just arrived in Germany for our big Spring Data summit. Our team is having a get  together to do some planning and scoping of work for the next year. And I couldn’t be more excited.

I arrived at 7:00 am local time, and waited two and half hours to discover the airline had lost my bag. But pay it no mind. I packed the critical in my carry on so with paperwork filed, it’s no sweat. The fun part (so far) was having the leverage my German to interact with my taxi driver, who spoke hardly any English.

Something i was able to contemplate while traveling, is that one of the biggest things I missed while working on Spinnaker was the jürgenized code base of Spring. The clean, elegant nature of all the portfolio projects really gives me a warm fuzzy.

Its hard to explain if you haven’t seen clean code before. But having a strongly enforced clean, consistent coding policy eases the mind. When we write code, we need to understand it. Sifting through inconsistent spacing, sloppy names, tabs AND spaces, and other aspects of code slows down the brain, making it hard to digest the functional aspects.

My father-in-law once shared that driving while it’s raining tires you out faster. He once had to drive at night through a lot of rain and it wore him out. The same can be said for sifting through sloppy, inconsistent code.

So this week I celebrate being back amongst my Spring Data mateys as he continue hammering out what has to be one of my favorite umbrella projects. Applying the concepts of the Spring programming model to Data management.

Cheers!