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Paul Brodner's Blog

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Tips & Tricks


    2018 one year in ... a retrospective

    2019 is near the corner, 2018 is now a thing of the past; checkout the highlights of my last year - not exactly in the right order.

    First part of the year, I’ve accepted to be part of the Delivery Engineering team.

    • my objective was to help delivery teams to automate and speed up the release process of their products.
    • during this time, I’ve synced with more than 10 teams, learned a lot about CI/CD process, digest a couple of books (see below) and interact with extraordinary and talented people.
    • I’ve also started to define a training program with lots and lots of practical exercise in order to train new junior members about: devOps, testing, automation testing, CI/CD, release processes, best practices, tips & tricks and much more…

    Implement one Automatic Newsletter

    • with the help of Microsoft Flow, each month a newsletter is automatically generated based on the feedback, information sent by individuals. There is a maintainer assigned to this application (if something needs to be changed/edited), but overall, the app is doing everything by its own.
    • the newsletter is auto-generated and sent automatically at a specified time (customizable) the compiled newsletter to the maintainer so he can accept it or decline it within his inbox. Preety neet! (probably I will start a new thread around this in the future)

    T.A.S. – Test Automation System

    • continue adding improvement for the system, currently I am in the process of migrating T.A.S. from java 8 to java 11.
    • It was a huge success, a project that I’ve started as a Test Automation Architect back in 2016, still used today for:
      • validating the releases (even for Alfresco 5.2) see Collaborating with Alfresco Engineering from Richard Esplin at BeeCon 2017
      • benchmark testing,
      • functional API and integration testing and much more …
      • T.A.S represents a collection of Maven projects interconected, built entirely with open source technologies, that are testing using a human friendly DSL (Domain Specific Language) core APIs and Protocols of Alfresco (5.0 and onwards)
    • until then checkout Tech Talk Live on Youtube from 2017 - a glimpse of the architectural decision, DSL used in a small demo or writting tests.

    Learned about Neo4j and implement a tool for analyzing Build Plans in Bamboo

    • see exactly what build plans are taking a long time to complete
    • see what scripts are reused, what stages are missing from build plans
    • see how builds plans are depended by each other using the Neo4j graph
    • analyze the projects that are using a lot of memory and more…
    • this project helped me understand the status of the CI tool in order to apply the right enhancements.

    Helped on Nessathon2018

    Whant to know more ? Leave here a message!

    Make public the docker training materials that I’ve started back in 2017

    • checkout this repo where you will:
      • learn about Docker, Docker Compose
      • how you can use this technology to build your image, even start your Alfresco app using docker images.

    This repository is just for learning purposes, please follow the official guidelines of starting Alfresco in docker, docker-compose.

    Built “HODOR” app

    • a “hold the door” app, that will automatically invite users to our private quay.io repository based on predefined rules.
    • weekly newsletter about repository usage
    • automatic synchronization with other 3rd application in order to keep track of people that are part of engineering teams
    • Technology: spring, java, mongodb, rest-apis, freemarker templates
    • This project was a practical example of applying the knowledge of “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”

    Well it toke 14 days not one week, but overall, I recomment to read it and follow the guidelines presented there!

    Lead of Automation Testing Practice

    • become lead of test automation practice in Iasi Ness Center

    Consultancy

    • continue helping others, helping my colleagues with differed automation challenges, architectural ideas

    Automate the entire process of generating 3rd party licensed used in a particular product

    • I’ve created one maven plugin and some scripts that will generate reports with 3rd partly libraries used, everything backed up by documentation and a clear process to follow.
    • this solution eliminated the manual burden of compiling the report from 1 week to a couple of seconds.

    Participate to NDR artificial intelligence conference in Iasi

    Participate to Pipeline Conference in London

    Finalizing Spring Framework 5 (from Beginner to Guru)

    • I followed this Udemy course.

    After successfully finalize my goal of handover the release process of each engineering team …

    • I’ve embarked into a new team in order to help them achieve a better test coverage with a little bit of flavor:
    • started with a discovery period to understand the project needs
    • implement 98% configuration by code
    • reduce the CI pipeline to 1 hour from build to release
    • deploy the product on different stacks in differed environments
    • design new approaches of testing compatibility matrixes automatically without manual intervention
    • .. let’s see what 2019 will bring

    Learning Kubernetes

    • Deploy application using kops in AWS

    Learning Jenkins-x

    • Finalizing some POC using Jenkins-X in order to achieve CI/CD

    Books that I’ve read:

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