The latest articles on DEV Community by Waleed Tariq (@waleed2660). https://dev.to/waleed2660 https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4063051%2Fc2f54dea-3a62-42f9-9834-77077d21f509.jpeg https://dev.to/waleed2660 en Waleed Tariq Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:01:06 +0000 https://dev.to/waleed2660/i-built-a-real-job-simulator-for-spring-boot-learners-free-open-source-n0e https://dev.to/waleed2660/i-built-a-real-job-simulator-for-spring-boot-learners-free-open-source-n0e <p>Most Spring Boot tutorials teach you to build a CRUD app and call it a day. But that's not really what the job looks like day to day, so I put together a project that mimics what you'd actually work on as a backend dev at a company with real infrastructure.</p> <p>🔗 <strong>Repo:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/Waleed2660/springboot-learning-kit" rel="noopener noreferrer">springboot-learning-kit</a></p> <p>I've added the following 12 tasks that you'd need to complete:</p> <ol> <li> <strong>Project setup</strong>: spin up Postgres + messaging brokers, verify everything's healthy</li> <li> <strong>Kicking off development</strong>: request validators, custom exceptions, a new order status API</li> <li> <strong>Debug a critical bug</strong>: chase down a duplicate-insert caused by misusing <code>EntityManager.persist()</code> vs <code>save()</code> </li> <li> <strong>ActiveMQ + Apache Camel</strong>: configure routes, consume from a queue, handle dead letter queues, publish to a Virtual Topic</li> <li> <strong>RabbitMQ</strong>: set up exchanges/bindings, fix an infinite redelivery bug, publish to a topic exchange</li> <li> <strong>DB schema migration</strong>: add a table with Liquibase, write rollback SQL, fix an N+1 write</li> <li> <strong>Testing</strong>: unit tests with Mockito, snapshot tests, integration tests with TestContainers</li> <li> <strong>Code style</strong>: enforce formatting automatically with Spotless + Palantir Java Format</li> <li> <strong>Prometheus metrics</strong>: expose app metrics via Actuator, configure scraping</li> <li> <strong>Grafana</strong>: connect to Prometheus, build dashboards, add <code>@Timed</code> annotations</li> <li> <strong>Load testing</strong>: run JMeter tests, interpret throughput, watch the impact in Grafana</li> <li> <strong>Global exception handling</strong>: swap per-controller try-catch for <code>@ControllerAdvice</code> + RFC 7807 Problem Details</li> </ol> <p>Everything runs locally via Docker Compose, and there's a Bruno collection included so you can hit the APIs without writing your own Postman setup.</p> <p>It's completely free and open source, so fork it, work through the tasks in order, and you'll come out the other side with a much better feel for what the job actually involves beyond "make endpoint, save to DB."</p> <p>Would love feedback from people!</p> springboot java opensource programming