Using annotations in Prooph

One of the things I love about Java is its native, compiler-level support for annotations, a form of syntactic metadata which can be applied to source code but also retain at run-time to influence application behavior. I use them almost daily in my projects.

I do a fair amount of consulting and development on event sourced applications and these usually use Axon, a popular CQRS & event sourcing framework. Recently, Axon version 3 was released, supporting a number of annotations that can turn any POJO (Plain Old Java Object) into an event-sourced aggregate.

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Training sessions and talks

One of the things I like most about my work is the ability to help teams improve, by sharing my experiences and knowledge in training sessions. These sessions can be conducted in the form of interactive workshops or talks.

I’m offering training sessions on DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Event Sourcing, Microservices and many other topics. Contact me if you’re interested in details or pricing!

The road to continuous deployment (PHPCon Poland 2016)

Below are the slides of my talk “The road to continuous deployment: a case study”, as presented at PHPCon Poland in October 2016.

It’s a situation many of us are familiar with: a large legacy application, limited or no tests, slow & manual release process, low velocity, no confidence…. Oh, and management wants new features, fast.

But how to proceed? Using examples and lessons learned from a real-world case, I’ll show you how to strangle the legacy application with a modern service architecture and build a continuous deployment pipeline to deliver value from the first sprint. On the way, we take a look at testing strategies and various (possibly controversial!) tips and best practices.

Docker & PHP: beyond virtual machines

(note: this post was first published on the blog of the Dutch Web Alliance)

Docker is currently one of the hottest technologies around, because it solves a very specific problem: the ability to easily package and deploy a (self contained) application, without the overhead of traditional virtualization solutions.

In this post you’ll learn how to build, run and host Docker containers, integrate with other containers, and see how Vagrant interacts with Docker.

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