Photo of Alexander Schwartz
Photo of Alexander Schwartz

About me

Web (ages), Java (years), Agile (repeatedly).
Working for @RedHat.

Contact me for talks, projects or to discuss ideas:

Phone: +49.172.6752068
Twitter: @ahus1de
Mastodon: @ahus1@fosstodon.org
Telegram: ahus1
Bluesky: @ahus1.de
E-Mail: alexander.schwartz@gmx.net
Other:  

I help organisations and teams to make architecture decisions that match their needs. To build their software in a maintainable way, I empower them with best practices, tools and libraries. I lead by example to adopt true agile processes and to stay curious. Ideas spark when sharing thoughts with others. Finding out if an idea works requires experimenting with code and UX. Measurable results of the experiment show if the idea worked out, and might lead to new experiments.

Over the time I've acquired some certifications, including Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP), Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD), Oracle Certified Professional: Java SE 11 Developer, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Change Project Manager, SaltStack Certified Engineer (SSCE), RedHat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), RedHat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers and Kubernetes and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

See here for an overview of the talks I give.

Present

Agile, Cloud Native, Coaching

Most teams I work in today use Agile. That is a recurring theme in my career: As a student I wrote my thesis about Extreme Programming, later I introduced Scrum at one of my previous employers. Since 2010 I'm also a Certified Scrum Master.

From a technical point of view, my present is about Cloud Native applications, mostly build with Spring Boot and parts of the Spring Cloud universe. For front ends I prefer Vue.js as it makes me productive: it keeps away the pointy and sharp edges, but gives me the power to tweak the necessary bits. For single sign on I trust in Keycloak.

Infrastructure is mostly Docker and Kubernetes in my projects (sometimes OpenShift). I'd love to use more of the Hashicorp stack, but let's see what the future brings.
For monitoring I use Prometheus and Grafana.

I automate all the things regarding infrastructure and deployment. For that I use Jenkins and Saltstack, but also other tools.

Besides consulting and software development I try to pass on knowledge both within the companies I work for and at user groups and conferences. Now and then I find the time to write an article.

Pleasure

IT as a hobby? Definitely a yes! There are Open Source projects I contribute to and some pro-bono work.

Then there is family, cycling, playing the piano. Sometimes hiking and Geocaching.
But that's not covered on this website :-)

Past

You build it, you run it!

A friend of mine introduced me to the Internet (back in the late 80s). Over time, I maintained websites (private, pro-bono and commercial) and worked with PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Once I built an online banking for an Internet bank based in Frankfurt (Germany) based on Java Enterprise Edition and IBM DB2. Other projects followed with lots of different technologies, including Oracle's Database and PL/SQL.

It was always about online customer experience, getting it to work both in the browser and in the back end, monitoring it in production and performance tweaking here and there.

For some years I was also a team lead and on call for the software that my team and me wrote. Today you would call that 'you build it, you run it'. But for us it was the most natural thing to do.