On a mild late autumn evening, we at Pace Integration hosted our last MuleSoft meet-up for 2019. It was my second meet-up and what another fantastic evening it was! For those of you who are yet to attend a meet-up, they are community-led events that bring people together to share and learn about API-led connectivity. It could be through knowledge share talks, hands on exercises or even demos, all wrapped around giveaways, pizza and prizes (Official MuleSoft training anyone?!). More importantly it’s a place to network with like minded individuals who have a keen interest in integration using the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform – you’ll be surprised how many people get to know each other.
With over 50 API developers and architects attending the meet-up, here are just some of the highlights of MuleSoft London November 2019 Meet-up! As well as personal opinion, I also managed to grab a few moments to get thoughts and comments, direct from the community.
An early arrive to the event was Sean Young, a regular attendee at the MuleSoft Meet-ups and someone that has also contributed in a past as a Community Superstar.
MuleSoft have been doing a lot of things right over the years. We have been working with it and growing alongside it and now they are reaping the benefits.
Sean Young – Consultant
First impressions of the November event were very impressive. Pace Integration have organised this one at WeWork Aldgate, which is not only a modern trendy venue, but has a great vibe with other co-workers and startups mingling and intrigued about the event.
Registration was completed by Nicoleta & Jee, whom ensured guests were greeted in a professional way, but also provided pretty cool lanyards with nametags! This is key to ensure people are identified for security, but also helps with the networking.
The meetup started out with some light networking over a pizza buffet. I took this chance to catch up with a couple of attendees to find out more about what bought them to the meetups and what they were looking for:
APIs are the way forward and MuleSoft are pioneering the landscape. For that reason, MuleSoft is a game changer.
Tonna Aguolu – Consultant
Talking further with Tonna, I found out that he was working on starting up a MuleSoft practice in Nigeria. Although concentrating on general technology consulting, Tonna mentioned that he is making a big push towards the integration space, hence attending the meet-up to find out more and connect with experts. This was definitely a common theme for MuleSoft entrants like myself and Tonna.
I found out about the meet-up through my colleague who did a talk here. It’s amazing opportunity to see real first hand experience!
Rajan Patel – Senior Solution Engineer
This was Rajan’s first meet-up and like many, found out about the MuleSoft from colleagues who attended. “It’s great that the community talks about applying latest trends rather than just talking about them”. It’s really great to see people getting stuck into the current topics, something we found out when we had our keynote speaker, Michael Jakeman on CI/CD.
After the pizza filled networking session, we gathered for the evening talks. At this stage we had a full room, with great atmosphere and many people already talking to new faces.
The event kicked off with Raj (Co-founder of Pace Integration) hosting the meet-up, with some fantastic interaction from the group. Funnily enough the “who’s been to a meet-up before?” Question had about a 50/50 split, which given all seats were full is a great ratio.
The next section has become a firm favourite, which is called the Community Superstar…essentially active community members give snippets about them and their API journey, highlighting MuleSoft experience. Abhishek Kumar kicked things off by sharing his 9 years’ worth of experience, spanning banking/finance to energy and utilities. Much of his experience was around SAP and naturally initiated some talk around the S/4 HANA MuleSoft Connector. Pace Integration have some key insights within SAP S/4 HANA and took an action to share within a future meet-up.
Following on from Abhishek was our keynote speaker, Michael Jakeman, Solutions Architect at Slalom. I understand Mike has been a key member of the MuleSoft Meet-up Community, for a number of years. His talk was centred around Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CICD). Though the lead-up to the meet-up, we found that this was a hot topic in the community, allowing for a more efficient practice on activities ranging from testing to code changes.
There was a focus on the deployment aspect of the pipeline. Michael introduced the Mule-Maven Plugin which is provided as a part of Mule Framework. It allows us to run integration tests for Mule Application, and also to deploy the application to various environments.
Q: When you are pushing your build to runtime, how can we secure the config file?
A: Properties can be stored in a Jenkins file….and manage the properties in one file rather than having 20configs.
Q: Seems very easy and a no brainer. What are the cons?
A: …there is no concept of a rollback if deployment fails….assets are only stored on the Jenkins instance.
Q: Is there still more to do?
A: Still more improvement to be made”. There are drawbacks that can be worked on and clue is in the ‘continuous’.
A: It’s never truly finished in terms of how far you can automate.
With final drinks finishing off the evening, this was another fantastic MuleSoft meet-up. Filled with networking and practical talks, starting out the MuleSoft journey amongst other entrants and experts in a community provides such a wealth of knowledge. Make sure to follow MuleSoft & Pace Integration on LinkedIn to find out when our next meet-up will be! See you at our next Meet-up in 2020 and if you want to get involved to present or showcase your experience at the London Meet-ups – please get in touch with [email protected].
I am certainly looking forward to the next Meet-up and will report again on the key activities.
Written by Asim Naeem.
Come along on Wednesday the 26th February to our upcoming meet-up to cover exciting topics.
Reserve your seat now and join us for great networking and engagement on MuleSoft topics! See you there!