February wrap-up - Serverless book and talks, Code Golf and Triathlon referee

March 2, 2017

Tags: #wrapup #summary #digest #serverless #serverlessbuch #book #aws #cloud #codegolf #javaland

February was quite a packed month. It’s already March, 2nd as I’m writing the february wrap-up - shame on me…

As I ended the january wrap-up with the teaser to my OOP conference talk on serverless computing, I will start right there:
Upfront, I was skeptical if a talk on cutting-edge technology like serverless is, will work at a conference like OOP, because

However, it turned out that also people at OOP are curious and so I counted approx. 100 people listening to me at 9am (I expected at max. 30-40 ppl.). Feedback was good, so I was happy.

Two weeks later, I had the chance to give the same talk (slightly adjusted) at Entwicklertag Frankfurt. Also many very interested people, asking good questions, having good discussions.

Talking about a topic is fun when you know the stuff well. And getting to know the stuff is fun when writing a book. And as you might know, I’m currently writing a (german) book about serverless computing. Febraury was the second month on writing and slowly there’s more content. First feedback from my publisher was good and gave me another drive on writing.

A thing I really underestimated is creating code examples for the book. Finding the right size to understand the example with less context is not an easy thing to do.

The deeper I dig into the details, the more I’m excited of all this stuff. As it is my first book, I was a bit frightended if I can write enough to call it a “book”. But meanwhile… hey, there’s enough content to publish a series… ;-)

Additionally to writing the ServerlessBook, I still have to prepare my Code Golf app for JavaLand. I’m offering this community activity again, the second time after last year. It is really fun to ask for as small as possible code solutions for some tasks. Last year, people really tried to get rid off even the very last possible chars.

The downside was, that I had to compile and test the code samples all on my own and I didn’t provide a test-suite people could use to verify their results. This will change this year! All participants can submit their solutions via an online application which will compile and run the code against a test-suite, giving immediate feedback to the submitter. Of course, I’m using cloud technologies and even AWS Lambda functions for executing the code in a “safe” environment, not crashing my main app. I hope you’ll participate - first prize is a cool Variobot robot!

Man, this is fun! I’m really looking forward to JavaLand 2017 in the end of March!!! And besides the Code Golf thing, I’ll give two talks - of course on Serverless and the other one is about using server-side (universal/isomorphic) React.js in a Java EE environment using MVC 1.0 (slides here). Even Ed Burns mentioned me in his JavaLand 2017 Picks. Thanks for that, mate!

And last but not least - meeting lots of old and hopefully new friends, talking nerd stuff!

What else happened?
Well, after last weekends training course, I’m now a Triathlon referee. I’m excited and looking forward to the first competition where I can judge about the athlete’s performances. Hopefully, all of them will act fair and won’t do drafting!

To proceed with conference talks, I submitted a bunch of proposals to various conferences. Let’s see what will happen and where I’ll be supposed to talk.

A few days ago, the new Java Magazin (german) issue was published with an article of me about API Gateways, what they are and which tasks they do. I already got a lot of positive feedback - thanks everyone for pointing the rest of us to the article. There’s an online version (not that long as the printed one) here.

And, as always, there’s so much interessting stuff which is really worth reading and trying out, but there’s so little time…
So long, stay tuned and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m happy to answer!

« January wrap-up - cruise, new gig and a book on serverless computing March Wrap-up - All Serverless - Book and JavaLand »