Downtime’s no fun - Time to build

So here we are in October 2020. On September 30th I finished transitioning my latest project to another team and I am having some down time before starting a new job. I’m not used to down time, so I’m going to fill it by building something and trying out some new ideas.

In the last couple of years I fell in love with CQRS+ES and Kubernetes as a way to build and manage microservices. I used the Axon Framework by AxonIQ for its Event Sourcing and it’s adherence to Domain Driven Design. I used the JHipster Framework as a way to get the infrastructure and libraries needed for robust microservices.

I don’t have a real reference implementation to fall back on and since I started this journey in 2017, things have already changed. So I plan to work through building an event-driven microservice application with CQRS+ES architecture. I’m going to deploy it first to an on-prem kubernetes cluster and then to either AWS or GCP (maybe both). I’m a java developer so this will be in Java, but I hope along the way to push into Kotlin (still the JVM I know) and learn some GoLang and some different front ends.

I also plan to follow some sane design procedures and talk through the process of thinking through and building an event-driven and event-sourced system. It’s not the typical way to build an application, but its a much better one. So as I go along I’m going to take time to write about the concepts and the pitfalls I and my previous team encountered. Should be fun!

The first hurdle though is: What am I going to build? I’ve got some thoughts on that and will elaborate in the next post.