Stratospheric Programming

Some years ago I was doing some work to design a full text search capability for my employer. In my research, I stumbled on reflectoring.io. The site promotes itself as "Where the HOW meets the WHY" and I immediately found value in a couple of articles, then only a year or so old: Full-Text Search with Hibernate and Spring Boot and Using Elasticsearch with Spring Boot. 

Reflectoring introduced me to Stratospheric, the work of several of the Reflectoring's authors, Björn Wilmsmann, Philip Riecks, and Tom Hombergs. I picked it up recently. 

Why is a career Solutions Architect and Java apologist with 20+ years of experience picking up a book about Spring Boot and AWS? Because learning is a life long goal and learning from doers is as important as learning from thinkers.

I tend to take apart books like this, not in a critical sense, but in an "applied theory" sense. Stratospheric approaches the project is a specific way, using tools I'm not comfortable with—Gradle? I'm a Maven man myself—vs tools I'm very familiar with as well as actions I like to see automated.

So I'm hacking the book's code to build, run, and deploy in a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in GitLab and AWS using To Be Continuous templates to build the end-to-end project.

In doing this hacking, I tease apart the code, understand it, and the intended result, while all the time meeting the author's goals. Already, I've learned enough about Gradle to say, meh. I won't be converting to Gradle, or refactoring the source to Maven, but I've thought about opening a PR. The authors are committed to Gradle and probably have the same to say about Maven: meh. Maintaining a fork or the PR might be overhead neither of us want.

All said the book let's me also experience some of the day-to-day use of AWS I don't see in drawing lines and boxes with icons about individual AWS services used in proven patterns. The book helps me rekindle my hands on keyboard style, especially in contributing to team success.

I do have some coding suggestions for the authors I might push back to them as a PR (or patch) like using Testcontainers from the outset. Pipelining the finish product revealed some challenges. I'll be looking at that.

Kudos to Björn, Philip, and Tom. Just good writing and a great project if you're looking to get a handle on Spring Boot application development with AWS.

I'll just leave this here. If you can't tease your fellow travelers in Java, then „Was ist Spaß?”