Recent Posts
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December 14, 2019
Mind the involuntary observational learning
Today I want to talk about something that has been bothering me for quite a while now - the side effects of how we teach people to use frameworks, libraries, tools, …
It’s an issue I’ve observed a lot over the years. To the point I have somehow trained myself to immediately notice it when I see it. It’s present in conference talks, blogs, articles, video tutorials, code samples, … virtually any type of learning material that shows Java classes in packages. A lot of those materials are created by people whose knowledge and intentions are unquestionable. I’m full of respect for the great work those folks do. Yet I can’t help but notice how many of them involuntary introduce to young developers a very bad practice.
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December 02, 2019
Conference Tracker
I try hard to keep track of conferences around the world. Mainly in a Google spreadsheet but also in a calendar shared with my team. I always thought that if all the DevRel folks were to share and merge their spreadsheets (or whatever else they use) into one single place, it would literally save days of work.
As Liferay Portal (the product I mainly work with) transitions more and more into headless backend for React, Angular, Vue.js, … based application, I felt it’s time to get out of my Java comfort zone. I thought it would be nice to build a SPA that is more complex than “Hallo World”, simple enough to be build in days rather than weeks, relatively good looking (for a non-designer like me) and ideally useful to someone.
And then something happened … Love at first sight normally occurs to souls, but this time it enamored two ideas!
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November 12, 2019
Would you attend one of those talks?
After several years of traveling around the world to speak at conferences, I needed a break. I have no idea what people like Venkat Subramaniam or Josh Long or Philipp Krenn are made of, but the assembly line that made me, certainly didn’t use the same material. Luckily 2019 offered me that break and allowed me to focus on other things. It was great time but also kind of sad as I like to share the little things I know with other people and I like even more to learn from the people I meet. So I’m planning to be back on the road in 2020.
But before that I need a little help from you in the form of your honest feedback.
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November 24, 2018
Fire alarm at software conference
I guess if you do something often and long enough, you get to experience all possible scenarios eventually. Leaving the conference venue due to fire alarm going on, was not necessarily on my bucket list but now I can both add it and scratch it off at the same time. It happened last week in Malmö, Sweden.
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February 14, 2018
The fruits of our labor
I usually do rather technical talks around software architecture and design. Unless one is а famous storyteller, IT conferences would rather take one more “What’s new in the latest version of XYZ technology” than risk a bet on something that may end up anywhere between boring and sales pitch. I don’t blame them but that is why it is not often that I’m given the opportunity to speak about culture, purpose and all those non-measurable, soft, human things. Therefore I’m extremely grateful Let’s Manage IT invited me and trusted me to give exactly this type of talk. Knowing that I’ll likely not have the opportunity to present it anywhere else, I decided to convert it into a blog post and publish it here.