Two weeks ago, me and my wife, we have packed our stuff and went for a weekend ‘break’ to Warsaw. It wasn’t a usual break as I was doing a workshop on Saturday. Still we have managed to find some time to check Polish capital - interesting city. Blend of old and new, mix of capitalism and remnants of communism. There is a lot of history waiting for exploration. If you are into Polish dumplings ‘Pierogi’ you have to check ‘Zapieciek’ excellent stuff, plus they also have amazing ‘Flaki’, no idea how to translate this one to English. Cooked intensities? Hmm.

Introduction to Microservices - Dismantling the Monolith. This was the topic. It was an introduction to microservices world with theory and coding practices. For 6.5h, I had the pleasure to share knowledge with an amazing group of people. Of course there was not enough time and we had to cut the end a bit. My first mistake but more on this later.

Agenda:

• Presentation - Microservices as a tool to build distributed system
• Coding practices
  • Building first microservices in .NET and Windows
  • Cutting down monolith into smaller pieces and introducing microservices

How it went. From my point of view, it was exciting. There is something special in presenting / teaching people. I feel super energised, when I am on a stage or in a class sharing knowledge. It went pretty smooth with ‘minor’ issues.

From the attendes point of view (based on the surveys).

Overall score

How interesting and usefull where the practical examples

Trainer knowledge about the subject

Trainer teaching skills

What could be improved:

• better practices focused on main topic
• wasted time on boiler plate code
• The speed of exercises was too fast
• Technical hiccups. Avoidable by better preparation and ‘virtualization’
• Need Docker to speed up preparation phase
• Chat - Slack etc. to share code snippets
• Need to improve RabbitMQ knowledge

Some ideas and notes from attendes:

• more snippets to save time spent on boiler plate code
• github with branches + readme files explaining details and next steps
• more time spent on explanation why and how something works instead of coding
• this workshop should be expanded to two days
• expected more about how to splint monolith, how to monitor services
• slighlty more theory and presentaitons, there was too much coding practices
• instead of using windows services as a hosting platform use cloud

I am grateful for all those suggestions and feedback. It is important for me to improve future workshops. DevWarsztaty attendees were excellent and provided detailed suggestions. It was a bit surprising, usually after presentations and talks people are not that keen to share their thoughts. DevWarsztaty team is always looking for new ‘teachers’, Mateusz Korzel just go for it!

I am planning to do more workshops:

• June this year in Wroclaw
• This year in Katowice and London

There is also idea to create a 2-day workshop in London with Pawel Sawicz. That could be interesting and was one of the suggestion from devWarsztaty. Thanks for that.