Last Sunday I survived my first Xletix run. It was painful, exhausting and absolutely wonderful.

As you may see from the side bar on this blog I do a fair amount of public speaking. So far I have done almost all of these talks for free. The organizers sometimes paid for travel and hotel rooms which is nice but my awesome employer does take care of that if the organizers don’t.

In first article I outlined the tech stack behind my talk slides based on Reveal.js and AsciiDoc.

Depending on how you look at it me speaking at the Spring One Platform is or isn’t somewhat surprising. On the one hand, I’m a Pivotal employee and part of the Spring Data team. As such I kind of had an advantage when submitting a talk to the Spring conference organized by Pivotal.

In my last article I outlined the tech stack behind my talk slides based on Reveal.js and AsciiDoc. This article will show how to create a footer for slides using these tools.

PowerPoint drives me insane. Appart from issues like spontaneously replacing a font in a presentation while I present the slides there is a more fundamental issue: PowerPoint forces you to use PowerPoint. I can’t use my favorite text editor. I can’t use my favorite version control. Well, I can but I won’t get useful diffs out of it.
Or try checking the content of your slides with a tool like Grammarly. And good luck presenting slides done in one version with a different version of PowerPoint (or none at all). If you do slides to present once during a meeting that is probably not an issue for you.

A couple of weeks ago I fixed a bug in Spring Data related to date conversions. For this, I read up on the “new” java.time API which I had hardly used so far. To my surprise, I learned that we used it wrongly in Spring Data. And judging from what I saw on StackOverflow and the rest of the internet many others make the same mistake. The mistake is to use LocalDateTime.

On Tuesday one of the best Java conferences in Germany opens its doors. Many of us will be there the evening before and stay in the hotels at the location. So we can start the Tuesday by some (not so) light workout!

At the beginning of the year I had a little twitter discussion about TDD. It started of as a request for some documentation about TDD. But after some back and forth it turned out that the goal was to convince the members of a team to adopt TDD in order to fight quality problems.

It’s now over 9 months since I joined the Spring Data Team. Time for some looking back.