It has been two years now since I have joined Ippon, and I thought it would be fun to talk about the adventure.
When I first started, we did not yet have an assignment for me. Romain and I talked about different technologies Ippon wanted to explore. Of those, I decided to pursue learning about the open source project JHipster. So I spent a lot of time creating different projects and filling any gaps in my knowledge on the JHipster stack.
I ended up being without a full-time assignment for quite some time. As we talked to potential clients or about expanding needs at existing clients, I had the opportunity to explore the ELK stack for a client. I also took several classes on Cassandra and passed a test on the technology. A coworker and I put together a white paper on Big Data and Cassandra. I also presented JHipster at a couple different Java User Groups.
As we grew, we started having coding dojos. I ended up leading several of these about JHipster, but we had a Big Data dojo and an AWS dojo as well. We bring everyone back from their client assignments to participate and learn at the dojos. We also like to host community events like user groups and Meetups at our office. Many times after the events we end up socializing and enjoying each other’s company.
I finally landed my first client based on both my newly acquired JHipster knowledge and the fact that someone at the client really loved JHipster and wanted to talk to the people who know it best. I ended up customizing JHipster for that client and also providing architectural consulting. I had an opportunity to attend a big conference in Las Vegas with the client, and we also ended up bringing in another consultant there as well. One of the most fun opportunities at this client was building some proof-of-concepts for the big conference.
My next opportunity involved more architectural consulting. The client had some dated technology and a lot of custom code that is now handled by open source frameworks. I was able to introduce Spring technologies to the client, and it was exciting to see the developers discover the power of a modern framework. We brought in two other consultants as well to work with the agile teams and to lead this migration by example. Now we are continuing the charge by introducing more new technology including Hashicorp Vault.
My current client is building a large system from scratch and is using technology such as Angular 2 and dynamic provisioning from AWS. We were able to bring in a whole team of developers to help this project succeed. There are numerous challenges with running such a large project and keeping everyone on the same page. We are using Spring Boot microservices for our API layer.
As you can see, I have had a chance to work with quite a few different technologies since joining Ippon. For me, that is the ultimate reason why I love consulting. I get to work on different technologies for different clients and everything stays fresh. And the work culture is what I really love about Ippon. Since we are small, everyone has a big impact and each of us can feel responsible for the success of the company. We know how to work hard and get the job done while also having a good time.
