Solace Developer Spotlight: Sjaak Overgaauw

Hometown: Hellevoetsluis, The Netherlands (40 km from Rotterdam)
Years of being a developer: 25
Primary programming language(s): None. We are a low code company. Past: Java
Social media presence: LinkedIn and Twitter

How did you start as a developer?
I started at school in the 80’s. Commodore 64 and 128! 😊 And later on when I started working with the Oracle RDBMS and Java.

What is your typical day like?
I’m co-owner, architect and CTO at Appronto. We’ve about 30 employees building solutions based on Mendix, Boomi, and Solace technology. Most days are a combination of several things:
• Architecture & design for customer projects
• Pre-sales activities
• Product development
• Research: event-driven-architecture, microservices

What is your favorite thing about being a developer?
Exploring new features of platforms, especially in the area of statistics (platform monitoring).

What project are you currently working on?
I’m working on multiple projects implementing Boomi and Solace based on EDA. Other projects I’m working on help customers to develop reference architectures, architectural guidelines, roadmaps, etc.

What new skills or technologies are you learning?
Our company has added Solace to the product portfolio as the standard message. So, Solace is pretty new. Other than that, we’ve a strong focus on Amazon AWS EC2 for our hosting solutions. I’m currently exploring the capabilities of Kubernetes for Boomi and Solace.

What cool tech trends are you seeing?
Event-driven architecture (EDA) is getting more and more traction, especially from developers who had a bad experience with classic microservices architectures 😊. Microservices are in trouble.

What do you think is the must-read book for developers?
I’m not reading books anymore, only online articles and blogs. My recommendations are Technology Radar and InfoQ. I spend 30 minutes a day on them and have a good overview of trends and new technologies.

What advice do you have for other developers?
Some advice from my side:
• Always ask yourself if there is a standard solution or platform available already. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel.
• Many software issues can be avoided by taking architecture seriously.
• Avoid over-engineering. Keep it simple.

If you could retire now, what would you do?
Traveling with our camper in Europe and enjoy. Good food, different cultures, nature and silence. There are lots to discover 😊

If you were a Solace Developer Community admin for one day, what would you do?
Haha. I actually don’t know. I think the Solace community is working well compared to other community platforms. So that’s a compliment!

Do you have anything else to share with the Community?
I would love to see:

• the Solace Cloud platform will develop itself into a more elastic platform from an infra point of view. No more upgrades, flexible infra (RAM, CPU’s, connections, queues)
• All Solace CLI features will be added to the Solace Cloud UI
• You can manage Solace software brokers from the Solace Cloud console. So, managing any Solace instance from the Cloud. Just like Boomi 😊.