Michiel Rook's blog

Season’s greetings from Utrecht!

December 24, 2016February 7, 2018Michiel Rook

Utrecht – Domtoren in de sneeuw (Chris Heijmans – order a print here)

This amazing photo was taken by Chris Heijmans in 2012. Last year, I ordered a canvas print, which is now proudly displayed in my home. Admittedly, current conditions (partly cloudy, windy, 8 degrees celcius) are nowhere near what’s pictured, but one can hope 😉

2016 has been interesting! I’ve met loads of cool people and been part of some amazing projects. Thank you for reading this blog, attending my talks, following me on Twitter, or listening to me advocate (rant?) in person.

From my cozy, little hometown Utrecht I wish you and yours happy holidays, see you in 2017!

The Strangler pattern in practice

November 20, 2016October 31, 2017Michiel Rook

In this post I’ll discuss my experiences with the strangler pattern and how it can be applied when rewriting a large, legacy code base.

All Day Devops

November 3, 2016November 2, 2016Michiel Rook

In a little less than two weeks, on Tuesday November 15th, I’ll be speaking at All Day Devops. A free, online DevOps conference spanning 15 timezones with 50+ sessions.

Join me at 10 AM GMT for my session “The Road to Continuous Deployment”.

CQRS & Event Sourcing in the wild (ScotlandPHP 2016)

November 2, 2016November 2, 2016Michiel Rook

Below are the slides of my talk “CQRS & Event Sourcing in the wild”, as presented at ScotlandPHP 2016.

Phing development update

October 20, 2016February 28, 2017Michiel Rook

A few months have passed since the last Phing development update, so it’s about time to discuss some of the recent changes.

Continuous Delivery, DevOps & Microservices literature

October 12, 2016February 2, 2018Michiel Rook

Recently I was asked for books and other literature recommendations on the subjects Continuous Delivery / Deployment, DevOps and Microservices. Here are some of the books, articles and talks I think are worth consuming.

The road to continuous deployment (PHPCon Poland 2016)

October 9, 2016October 9, 2016Michiel Rook

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.

The road to continuous deployment (PHPCon Poland 2016) from Michiel Rook

Branches considered harmful

October 4, 2016October 9, 2016Michiel Rook

“Don’t use branches”. Three words that are guaranteed to trigger reactions when I utter them during my continuous deployment talks. Three words that make for interesting discussions. This post contains some of the arguments I use during those discussions. Read more →

Concurrent commands in event sourcing

September 27, 2016November 28, 2017Michiel Rook

In this post I want to talk a little about concurrency in the context of CQRS and event sourcing. Specifically, when a single aggregate is concurrently accessed by two commands (or command handlers, really). Read more →

Event versioning (or why I sometimes modify the event store)

September 2, 2016November 14, 2017Michiel Rook

Requirements and applications evolve and change, leading to refactoring. For example, user registration now requires a first and last name, what was once an error may no longer be considered one, etc. In an event sourced application, that poses a few problems. In this post I’ll discuss a few strategies and my views on event versioning.