It is almost the end of the year, we are getting ready for 2013. Therefore I want to look back at my 2012 as a software engineer. I want to look back at the blogs I have written, the presentations I have given, the books I read and the conferences I attended. This blog post will give a nice overview of my year and therefore a lot of links to the things I found interesting.
Twitter
I am not a very active user on twitter with @gridshore. I do twitter more with my personal account @jettroCoenradie. Still it is not hard to see what I was busy with this year. Check my twitter overview created with vizify
Presentations
This year I presented at two events. At the Hippo Gettogether I presented about the ldap integration we did at the University of Amsterdam. You can find the slides here at slideshare.
At the yearly JFall conference of the NLJug i presented about creating polyglot and scalable applications. You can download the slides, but you can also watch the presentation on Parleys.
Blogs
When looking back I see there is not a lot of activity on the gridshore website. Most of my activity moved to my employers blog. Therefore I have decided to write a short post in here as well when I write a blog post at my employers blog.
My year started with a blog post about running the hippo cmd components from within intellij. At Hippo they preferred the cargo plugin to run their components, which is not ideal when debugging your software. Therefore I came up with a way to make it easy to run your components in intellij.
The next blogpost I wrote was about creating a MongoDB based event store for the Axonframework. Allard made some nice improvements to the event store, but this was the foundation. The event store is used in a sample application called the Axon Trader. More on this later on.
I am a hobbyist photographer. I attend a number of workshops every year at Yvonne van der Mey. She needed a new website and I like to help people out. Therefore I created a wordpress based website for her. I have a number of other wordpress website under maintenance (www.wateenjuweeltje.nl, www.coenradie.com,www.nicobulder.com). In the beginning I was doing my editing on the server, but I wanted to have a better solution. I started using git to have a history for my scripts. Manually copying the sources to the server was not nice. Therefore I created a few scripts to check git what changes were not send to the server yet. Using ftp I send these files to the server. Of course I wrote a blog post about this: Deployments with Git and Bash on a Mac.
I continued building applications using Axonframework and MongoDB. I already created the event store, but an application using axon also has a query side. For the Axon Trader sample I wanted to use MongoDB for the query side as well. I heard about the spring-data project and thought there was a good match for my sample. In this blog post I discussed my experiences with the spring-data project and the MongoDB module specifically.
For a number of projects we wanted information about the server using a ping request. I thought it was good to create something reusable, therefore I created the Healthcheck library. In this blogpost you can read more about the java based health check library.
For the University of Amsterdam we are creating a Hippo based solution for their new websites. Like with other hippo projects we have a lot of integration to do. I usually create an administrator application for managing all these integration components. Of course we do not want everybody to be able to login, therefore we have created an authentication mechanism for Spring-security to authenticate against a hippo repository. This blog post discusses that mechanism.
During 2012 I started learning about Vert.x. This is a very nice application framework to create scalable/polyglot applications on the JVM. I had an idea about a presentation proposal for the NLJuG JFall event. Before being able to present about it I had to learn. Usually I learn by creating sample applications and blogging about my experiences. Therefore I wrote this blog post about my first steps with vert.x. This was a very well read blogpost that was tweeted about 32 times. Nice to know that people liked what I was doing.
During the Devoxx conference I learned about AngularJS. I really liked the idea around this JavaScript framework. It also seemed easy enough to work with. With my interest in Vert.x and Axonframework I wanted to combine this knowledge in a sample application. This blog post described my experiences: Basic Axon Framework sample using vert.x and angular.js.
Conferences
In May I attended the GoTo conference in Amsterdam. At Trifork we organise all the GoTo conferences. The one in Amsterdam was a nice conference this year. I learned a lot and got really inspired by a few talks.
In November I was able to join the Devoxx conference. What I thrill this is. I attended a lot of presentations and we joined a booth with 10gen, the creators of MongoDB. I had some very interesting talks that made me think and want to try out new stuff. I really liked the talk about AngularJS. The evening I got back I rewrote a part of a sample using angularJS. This is really something for the future. Here you can read more about my devoxx 2012.
iOS
In this year I also started learning about iOS development. I started with an app for the iPad. But since both my kids have an iPod touch I wanted to create a very basic application to learn mathematics for the kids. I’ll write more about this in 2013.
Books
Like every year I spend some money on books. A lot of them are eBooks, but I also keep buying hard copy books.
- Presentation patterns – Neal Ford
- The lean startup – Eric Ries
- Just enough software architecture – George Fairbanks
- Java Performance – Charlie Hunt
- Don’t make me think – Steve Krug
- Spring Integration in Action – Mark Fisher
- 7 databases in 7 weeks – Eric Redmond
- iOS Storyboarding – Dr. Rory Lewis
- The iOS 5 developers Cookbook – Erica Sadun
- iOS SDK Development – Chris Adamson
