Great article! I was able to build my first spring boot project. This is the stuff I'm completely interested in, but didn't know how to get started. This helped immensely! A couple things to note for others attempting this: To get this working in Intellij, you need to close all projects and click on the "Open or Import" option. Intellij will then automatically detect everything and start building dependencies. If you were like me, you tried to do File > New Project and kept hitting a roadblock. You will need a Postman account- They have a free tier that you can sign for. Don't expect Postman to work without the desktop agent, though. Sign up for Postman here and download the desktop agent here (download links are at bottom of the blog post). This was fun! I think my next step will be to figure out how to make this into an actual website where you can enter a URL and check it and return the status.

Aagam Sheth I think it would be an interesting take! I've never used python, but it seems very popular right now. Lots of praise and tutorials out there. I haven't seen many critical write ups about it, though.

Hi, friend! I'm curious: Why do you hate python?

I had no idea this was a thing. I can already think of areas I could apply this to and it's so much quicker than an if else!

madalin ilie Got it! I'll check this out. I've never been so excited to log things to the console!

Being new to java, this is mind blowing to me! I can't wait to dig into this. Just so I am clear, I would need to be using slf4j to use pl4j?

Great simple explanation! I love your visualization of the laptops as an example. When I first started coding in java, I always had to remind myself to think of a Class as the blueprint to building a house. When creating a house (aka object), I use the blueprint (aka class) to create it.