My Last day at OCI

In January 2017, I wrote a blog post titled my first day at OCI. Today is my last day at OCI.

It has been seven and a half years. Thanks to OCI, I started a career in Open-Source, first in Grails and later in Micronaut.

Remote and flexible. Many years of remote work. I remember the pandemic. I was at home with two kids - 4 and 1 years old. My wife was the only one going out. She kept working in a hospital, buying food, etc. I kept working during those months thanks to my wife and OCI's flexibility.

Many Hats. I have done many things:

  • Helping clients with Grails/Micronaut. For example, I vividly remember helping a company to upgrade a Grails application. The catch was its source code variable names, and comments were in Danish. I don't speak Danish. Thus, it was a split desktop with Google Translate and IntelliJ IDEA. :-]
  • Becoming a Technical Writer. I became a technical writer. I have written/reviewed most of the Grails Guides and Micronaut Guides. I am incredibly proud of the Micronaut Guides pipeline. Every tutorial contains a sample project which users can download and run. The code snippets in those tutorials come from a real tested code. We generate applications programmatically. We build and run the tests in every tutorial for every Micronaut release. It is easy to upgrade every tutorial, often one line change, to a new version of Micronaut.
  • Public Speaker. I have been talking about Micronaut to Java user groups and conferences internationally.
  • Open-Source contributor. I have contributed a lot of code to Micronaut. For example, I have contributed to Security, AWS, Views, RSS, Problem+JSON, Email, Microstream, OpenSearch, Chatbots, and Multi-tenancy.
  • Podcast. I hosted, edited, and published the Micronaut podcast.
  • Training I have delivered training events, both online and on-site, for both Grails and Micronaut. I taught about Micronaut AWS Lambda integration, Micronaut Security, etc.
  • Release Manager. I have been responsible for Micronaut releases for two years - from the second quarter of 2022 until the second quarter of 2024. We released 47 patch releases, 17 minor releases, and a major version - Micronaut 4. We aimed to follow strict semantic versioning to ease user applications' upgrade and try to share the roadmap with the community.
  • Partners. I am proud of the work we did with Azul for the Micronaut CRaC integration, with MicroStream and EclipseStore or AWS Lambda
  • Technical Manager. I lead a small remote distributed team at Unity Foundation working on Micronaut. Without the work of Tim Yates, Jeremy Grelle, and Dean Wette, the previously mentioned releases and collaborations would be not possible.
  • Oracle Labs collaboration The previously mentioned releases were only possible with the extensive work of the Oracle Labs Micronaut Team. I am proud of the collaboration and joint effort of two development teams from different companies. It was proof of open-source collaboration by multiple vendors.

Fun memories I am incredibly grateful for the St. Louis trip with my family in December 2022. OCI welcomed me as a partner. It was a great trip, and having my family there was lovely.

To wrap up, I would like to thank OCI, especially Gina Bremehr and Jeff Scott Brown for supporting me during these years.

Tags: #career