Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I've just returned from London where I spent Monday talking to Pivotal customers and helping teams build software in terms of Spring.

Now I'm home for the holidays. Can you believe we're only a few weeks away from 2018!? Where has the time gone! Chanukah, Christmas and Boxing Day will all be over and Kwanzaa will have started before next week's installment of This Week in Spring, so on behalf of the Spring team and Pivotal as a whole, let me wish you the warmest and happiest of holidays!

We've got a lot to tide you over if you happen to have some time off, so without further ado, let's get to it.

• In this latest installment of Spring Tips, I look at one of the most important features in Spring Boot 2.0, and indeed in Spring, ever: the ASCII banners! Do NOT miss this one!
• I loved this talk introducing Consumer Driven Contract (CDC) by Spring Cloud Contract lead Marcin Grzejszczak and Adib Saikali.
• I really liked this first blog post for Project Riff, a serverless platform that we announced at SpringOne Platform 2017.
• This is an oldie but might be useful to some. In this post, Redmonk's James Governor and I look at cloud-native with Spring Boot.
• In this SpringOne Platform 2017 talk, Spring Framework Juergen Hoeller looks at Spring Framework 5.0 on Java 9.
• This is an interesting sample Spring Boot project that uses the Giraphe CMS framework and Spring Boot. Giraphe is a Spring Boot based headless CMS Framework.
• Baeldung have updated their REST with Spring tutorial, and it's always worth a look.
• The good Dr. Syer has put together a very nice tutorial looking at how to incept a Spring Boot project with Angular.
• IntelliJ engineer Yann Cébron knows how to start the journey to production: start.. dot.. spring.. dot.. io!
• It's that time of year again! All the SpringOne Platform 2017 videos are up and available! Binge watch 'em all and give yourself the gift of knowledge!
• Spring Data ninja Mark Paluch, who did a lot of the work behind the reactive Spring Data implementations, gave a great SpringOne Platform 2017 talk, Under the Hood of Reactive Data Access
• Spring community legend Jenn Strater gave a talk on _Documenting RESTful APIs with Spring REST Docs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaARz49u1Mc&list=PLSzU7snapMVZ4n5s5glQz4Dd_C3572O_2) for SpringOne Platform 2017 that is well worth a watch.
• The Linux Foundation has a nice course on building cloud native software with Cloud Foundry.
• InfoQ's Victor Grazi looks at the new Spring Security 5.0 release
• The epages blog has a nice post that looks at RESTful API documentation with Spring REST Docs and RAML
• InfoQ's Victor Grazi had a nice interview with Reactor engineer Simon Basle and marketing manager Pieter Humphrey
• Spring ninja Thomas Risberg put together a cool Project Riff - our recently announced serverless platform - demo that you can inspect here
• the Open at Microsoft blog looks at Pivotal Cloud Foundry's latest release supporting Microsoft Azure