Hey that's fantastic. I'd love to hear more! You went 5 years in the direct direction I want to go (Spring Boot + Thymeleaf). I'm a bit confused why you were having difficulty finding work with Java. Seems like there's a lot of Java work out there.
What I found, and I may have been wrong, is that there is a lot of Java work but if you look deeper it is hardcore Java EE with all thise 200 levels of Java that a lot of folks fear. And so do I. Even jobs that had Spring Boot asked for the JavaEE experience.
I don't think it's just you. I came off a java gig about couple years back - typical enterprise... stuff. Lots of legacy stuff from 10-15 years ago that few people knew anything about, mixed docs, some tests, but not useful to learn from. Even pre-covid, far too few people for the size of the codebase and where they were trying to go. I started in October, I was given a ticket in November that someone else - who had left months earlier - estimated at '40 hours' in May of that year. This was my first 'task' at the company, and ... it took way more than 40 hours. It took 40 calendar hours to get a meeting with the PM to actually walk me through how to set up the bug the ticket was about. Some bigwig threw up to my manager that I was 'over budget' and 'threatened their client relationship' because I was taking so long (on a ticket that had been sitting around 5 months before it was estimated, then another 6 months before someone started working on it). They routinely rejected requests for info on the issue, or access to servers/data/etc. So... I went part time then, and moved in to something else pretty quickly. I know not all Java shops are like that, but it was like living in an enterprise cliché.
