While getting ready for my SDE interview, I worked on a Spring Boot project. It really helped me understand web development better and taught me a lot of useful things. At first, Spring seemed overwhelming because it covers so many topics—web development, security, data handling, and messaging. I tried to learn everything at once, but soon realized that wasn’t practical.
My mentor recommended that I focus on the core parts of Spring Boot, like the Spring container, dependency injection, AOP, Spring MVC, and Spring Data JPA. These are the basics of building web apps and also come up often in interviews. This approach helped me get started on projects faster and gave me a good understanding of Spring that I could talk about in interviews.
I also spent some time reading through Spring’s source code, especially looking at how common annotations like @Autowired and @ComponentScan work. This helped me understand how Spring manages beans and dependencies. For the project, I built a feature that allowed users to configure settings dynamically and used AOP for logging and monitoring performance. This gave me real experience with aspect-oriented programming.
As I worked, I started to see the value of following best practices. We first looked at the project requirements, designed the database, and set up RESTful APIs.
What I’m most proud of is that my mentor thought it would take a week to finish, but I completed it in five days, including unit and integration tests. This taught me that good planning and breaking tasks into smaller parts can really improve productivity. I also deployed the app to the cloud and learned about CI/CD. I set up GitHub Actions to automate the build and testing, so every time I pushed code, the process ran automatically.
For containerization, I used Docker to package the Spring Boot app and deployed it using Kubernetes. This experience gave me a better understanding of how to scale and ensure high availability in modern software. I even used remote debugging to connect to the cloud service directly and fix issues faster.
Working on this project improved my technical skills and also helped me think about problems more clearly. If you’re preparing for an SDE interview, I suggest mastering the basics first and then learning by doing projects. Don’t be afraid to try new technologies—they’ll be useful for your career. Good luck with your studies and interviews!
Release time:2025-04-18
