New OSS challenges ahead
Today I am stepping down as the Activiti Cloud OSS Tech Lead @ Alfresco. We had so much fun with the Activiti Cloud OSS team during this last two years, designing and implementing the first iteration of Activiti Cloud. We (Alfresco and I) have different opinions on how to move the project forward, the direction and the main objectives. For these reasons, I want to explore some of these ideas out in the open. The Cloud Native space is growing really fast and there is a lot of exploration that I want to pursue at my own pace to be able to create a new breed of business automation tools and frameworks.
Over the last two years, we (with the OSS team) created a lot of code [1]. But code was not the only thing that we produced, we contributed to major Open Source projects outside of the Alfresco ecosystem and we pushed and shared as much as we could with other communities.
I had the pleasure to work with a world-class team: Elias De Medeiros, Ryan Dawson and Miguel Ruiz. (We also collaborated with some awesome guys such as Bassam Al-sarori, Constantin Ciobotaru, Lucian Oprea and Daniel Pancu, who truly understood the power of working in the Open). As a team, we didn’t have half the answers, but we were motivated to learn and iterate quickly. We all had the pleasure of interacting with amazing community members such as: Daisuke Yoshimoto, Igor Dianov, Illia Goncharov and Alex Merkulov. This has been a very rewarding personal and professional experience for myself, which once again proved that the Open Source Way of working keeps you always learning and working with like-minded and very smart people.
We were focused on the Kubernetes Ecosystem from day one and we went through the whole process of changing our mindset, learning new tools, and new practices until the point where things like Continuous Delivery became a must. During this process, we learnt so much from projects such as Spring Cloud, Jenkins X, JHipster and Keycloak which is why it is extremely important for me to thank the individuals that really promote Open Source and help other community projects to grow: Spencer Gibb and Ryan Baxter from Spring Cloud - Pivotal, Ioannis Canellos and Georgios Andrianakis from Red Hat, James Strachan & James Rawling from Jenkins X, and the whole awesome JHipster community.
As part of this Journey, I’ve had the opportunity to deliver presentations in more than 15 public events (at which I was accepted based on merit and by the relevance of the topics via c4p):
- JBCNConf 2019, Barcelona, Spain - May '19
- La Plata University Meetup, Mar del Plata, Argentina - March '19
- Healthcare in Gov Meetup, Buenos Aires, Argentina - March '19
- London DevOps Meetup, London, UK - March '19
- Alfresco DevCon, Dublin, Ireland - Jan '19
- GeeCon Prague 2018, Prague, Czech Republic - Oct ’18
- uServices London Meetup, London, United Kingdom - Nov ’18
- SpringOne Platform, Washington D.C., USA - Sept ‘18
- London Java Community Meetup, London, United Kingdom - July ’18
- JBCN Conf 2018, Barcelona, Spain - June ’18 (2hs Workshop)
- JJUG CCC 2018, Tokyo, Japan - May ’18
- GeeCon 2018, Krakow, Poland - May ’18
- uServices Meetup, London, United Kingdom - March ’18
- Alfresco Meetup, London, United Kingdom - Feb ’18
- Alfresco DevCon, Lisbon ,Portugal - Jan ’18
- JBCNConf 2017, Barcelona, Spain - June ’17
Last, but not least, we refreshed the Activiti website and we created a new logo for the project!
The project is well on its way and I wish Alfresco all the best for the future of the project. I will be more than happy to answer questions about Activiti, how to use it for specific scenarios, and the main advantages compared with other Open Source projects. Get in touch if you have any questions or if you need advice on these topics.
Having said this, it is now time for me to move forward to my next gig, which will definitely include Kubernetes, Knative, SMI: Service Mesh, CDF: Jenkins X, Tekton Pipelines, Cloud Native awesomeness and some Business Automation flavour in it :)
Stay tuned!
PS: I will be presenting at https://jhipster-conf.github.io at the end of the month and I am invited to speak at Jenkins World San Francisco (https://www.cloudbees.com/devops-world/san-francisco) August 12-15 and Lisbon (https://www.cloudbees.com/devops-world/lisbon ) December 2-5. If you are planning to go to any of these events get in touch!
[1]: my stats for the last year, I was quite busy :)
We closed more than 607 (until 7.1.0.M1) into 17 releases that we tagged for external consumption. Based on: https://github.com/activiti/activiti/milestones?state=closed