Maciej Walkowiak

About Me

Maciej Walkowiak I am a freelance software consultant working primarily with Java/Kotlin and Spring. I help companies in taking architecture decisions choose right and building software that's easy to evolve and maintain.

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Approach

I believe that following Agile principles, independent teams, Continuous Delivery and Trunk Based Development is the best way to build software products. If it is not possible to implement them from the start they should be a direction to follow.

I prefer Kanban over Scrum as it's simpler to implement and from my experience it results in much less wasted time on often not fruitful ceremonies. If Scrum works for you - great! I have no plans to change your process then.

While I am a big fan of Agile, I am terrified by the amount of Dark Agile in the industry.

Technology Stack

I specialize in developing software with Java, Spring Framework and AWS. It is a perfect combination for many web and enterprise applications. It is not always the best choice though. I choose technology based on how it fits the customer, team and the problem to solve. Often it's Java/Kotlin with Spring but there are cases where other languages and frameworks bring more benefits.

On the frontend side of projects my default choice is ReactJS (although this page is built with VueJS, Gridsome and Tailwind CSS).

Read more about how I choose the tech stack.

Spring Academy

I like sharing my thoughts and knowledge. I find video tutorials very handy way of acquiring knowledge and last year I set up a YouTube channel - Spring Academy with Spring tutorials and news from the ecosystem. Spring Academy YouTube page

Speaking

Speaking at events is another way to share knowledge I enjoy. I gave couple of talks in past years mainly about Spring on local meetups, then my personal life got busy for couple of years (I'm a father!). I am slowly getting back on track.

This year I gave a talk at the Spring IO conference in Barcelona - "The State of Java Relational Persistence" that you can watch on YouTube. Maciej Walkowiak speaking at Spring IO

Here you can find slides from all my talks.

Open Source

I lead Spring Cloud AWS project since May 2020 and since August 2020 work with Sentry on Sentry Java SDK.

Time to time I contribute to other open source projects - mainly from Spring umbrella. I was one of the first external contributors to Spring Data MongoDB project by adding JSR-303 validation capabilities and added also couple of small improvements to Spring Boot, Spring AMQP, Spring Data JDBC. Maciej Walkowiak's github page

My GitHub profile @maciejwalkowiak.

Teaching

Have I already mentioned I like sharing knowledge? I enjoy teaching and really like to see people growing. In 2018 I joined Redi School and teach Java to refugees helping them to get their foot into Berlin job market. I am very proud to say that four of my students in 2019 started their career in software development. Java Intermediate course teachers at Redi School

Unfortunately late 2019 I had to leave Redi as my son went to kindergarten and I am the one who picks him up.

Certifications

I have no strong opinion if as an industry we benefit from certifications or not. I find the path to getting a certificate more attractive than a certificate itself.

I passed following certifications:

Social Media

I am active on Twitter and time to time I post my cats on Instagram. You are also very welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I don't use other social medias often as I don't find they bring much value to my life. I am on Facebook because that's where most of my friends are reachable online, but other than that I don't use it much.