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Lessons Learned in and News in February 2019

This is what I learned in February 2019:

  1. I love GitKraken. However, it is/was one of the few tools I couldn’t use without touching my mouse. But using the Fuzzy Finder (Ctrl + P), I can now execute the basic operations via keyboard. Yes I know, if I wanted to use the keyboard for everything, why not use the terminal. Partly correct, but I’m kind of a visual learner and love the graphical representation of the branches in GitKraken.
  2. In order to set up a CI-chain with Concourse CI, I learned about busybox. This video shows that busybox is simply an executable with the most important Linux commands like ls and echo in it. Busybox itself has a very small memory foodprint (a couple of MB) and is used for example in Alpine Linux.
  3. I’ve been setting up a deploy chain with Concourse CI. Here is a nice Github repository that shows how to build a Maven project on Concourse and deploy it on Cloudfoundry.
  4. Recently I learned about Github teams. Base line: An organization can have teams which have members and repositories that the members of the team can administer. This solves the problem of giving contributors more options to manage their code. Also, teams can either be publicly visible or private.
  5. A colleague of mine had a nice idea for the cloudfoundry-setup of one of our apps. By deploying the Spring Boot backend and the Angular frontend in the same org and same space under the same route, we didn’t have to configure CORS because both applications live under the same URI. We prefixed the URI for the backend with “rest” to differentiate between the two apps. So now we reach the client under ourapp.apps.io and the backend under ourapp.apps.io/rest.

These are the books I read:

  1. I read the short book “The five dysfunctions of a team”. In a fictional story, the problems of a top-management-team of an IT company are narrated. I was aware of the five “dysfunction” before I read the book and didn’t learn much new, but it’s nicely written and a fast-read.
  2. I read “REST and HTTP” by Stefan Tilkov, Martin Eigenbrodt, Silvia Schreier and Oliver Wolf. I’m developing Angular-applications for more than one year now. Reading about how REST-ful applications support the structure of the web way better than a Single-Page-Application (SPA) got me thinking. The book helped me understand some basic knowledge as well as higher-level architectural topics. Everyone developing web applications should read it, even (or especially?) when developing SPAs.

This is what I’m working on right now / planning to do in the near future / other stuff:

  1. Angular is still a major part of my current projects. Right now, I have four Angular projects in the making, including my formerly mentioned pet-project. Still outstanding is my wrap-up of the workshops.
  2. I’m looking forward to go to the famous Javaland in a couple of weeks!

(Photo: adrian825, http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/monthly-management-reports-36658768)