Crash Course In Java Brain Surgery

insinuation and speculations: My thoughts about Java, HTML5, software development and IT in general

My Year At Hazelcast In Review

Written by  Viktor Gamov -
laptop
TL;DR
It has been an awesome year full traveling (roughly 20 states), POCs for the clients and the prospects, training (including public classes) and conference talks. While I am already looking forward to 2016, here is a quick recap of my 2015 with Hazelcast.
Table 1. Revisions history
Version Date Comments

v1.2

1/6/2015

Added Groovy Puzzlers Video link from SpringOne 2GX

v1.1

12/31/2015

Added Atlanta JUG video link

v1.0

12/29/2015

Initial blog post

Into

2015 has been a helluva of a year for me, which started off with a new job: the Solutions Architect in Hazelcast - Open Source In-Memory Data Grid company. In addition to travelling to over 20 states, I had numerous opportunities to share my programming experience and how to develop and deploy the distributed systems. I enjoyed the conference talks, blog posts, and podcasts (1, 2, 3 in Russian).

Hazelcast Trainings

As a part of the solutions team at Hazelcast, I lead numerous training engagements for clients and open public classes in many places across the country, including Tampa, FL, Richmond, VA, New York, NY, Jersey City, NJ, Rockville, MD and Cary, NC. Just a couple months ago we launched our training portal - Hazelcast University. And I’m very pleased to tell you while it wasn’t easy, we did it! It has been rewarding to receive all the positive comments on the training labs.

By the way, don’t hesitate to ping me on Twitter if you’re interested in attending one of our courses online or in-person. I might even be able to provide you with discount!

Conferences and Events

One of my favorite activities in 2015 was getting to speak at many JUGs and conferences.

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Here is a sampling of some of the places and topics where I presented this year.

Event Name Location Topic Date

DevNexus 2015

Atlanta, GA

Applied real-world projects with Java and JavaScript

2015-03-11

Code PaLOUsa

Louisville, KY

Ground-up Introduction To In-Memory Data

2015-04 27-30

HUG-NYC Princeton JUG

Online NY/NJ

Hazelcast: In-Memory Data Grid Without Black Magic

2015-05-07

QCon New York

New York, NY

Ground-up Introduction To In-Memory Data

2015-06-12

SpringOne 2GX 2015

Washington, DC

The Epic Groovy Puzzlers S02: The Revenge of the parentheses

2015-09-16

SpringOne 2GX 2015

Washington, DC

Spring Framework: The Ultimate Configurations Battle!

2015-09-16

North Boynton Coders

Boynton Beach, FL

Hazelcast for Java Developers

2015-10-21

Orlando JUG

Orlando, FL

Distributed Caching and JCache

2015-10-22

GreenJUG

Greenville, SC

Hazelcast for Java Developers

2015-11-12

Richmond JUG

Richmond, VA

Distributed Caching and JCache

2015-11-18

Atlanta JUG

Atlanta, GA

Distributed Caching with JCache and Beyond

2015-12-15

Video from QCon 2015 talk is available.

Video from JCache talk given at Atlanta JUG 12/15/2015

Video from Groovy Puzzlers Talk with (@jbaruch) is available.

Other SpringOne 2GX 2015 talks were recorded and will be available shortly. Keep an eye on this page.

Contributions

When people ask me how one can contribute to an open source project, I suggest starting with something small but valuable like the documentation. It also helps to understand internal organizational mechanics of the project, the team, and the community. I did this myself! One of my first contributions to the project was a contribution to the «Mastering Hazelcast» book.

If you want to learn something more beyond official documentation (which is awesome. Kudos to the documentation team!) I highly recommend this book by Hazelcast Quality, Stability and Performance team lead Peter Veentjer.

I helped the team to improve usability by converting exciting sources from LaTeX to asciidoc. With asciidoctor tool we could render both online, PDF and EPUB versions.

Another important part of Hazelcast open source infrastructure is the collection of code samples. I contributed a number of samples including Hazelcast integration with MongoDB, JCache and Spring Boot.

Couple months ago, our engineering team published specification of Open Client protocol for Hazelcast. This enables to anyone from the community to develop Hazelcast for any missing language. A couple of my team mates (including yours truly) have started Hazelcast Node.js client project. Currently, it’s in pre-alpha state but it already can connect to Hazelcast cluster and perform some basic IMaps operation. This is another great way to contribute to this open source project. Jump in!

Plans for 2016

I’m looking forward to expanding the geography of my talks on Distributed Systems and Hazelcast - We have confirmed the inaugural Hazelcast User Group meet-up for Toronto in February:

  1. I’m coming back to Devnexus 2016.

I’m already confirmed to join the line-up of awesome speakers at the largest Java conference in Russia- JPoint 2016.

As always, I encourage you to keep an eye on Hazelcast Events page. We’re going to have a lot of exciting stuff in 2016. Looking forward to 2016 — Happy New Year !