I'm one of the architects who love to code. Most of the time, I use Java, JavaScript, and TypeScript. But it goes without saying that's just the beginning. Over time, I've been using dozens of other programming languages.
That's a recurring topic in my biography. At my company, the definition of a solution architect is we've got a pretty broad focus. We aren't specialists. Or rather, every solution architect does have their hobbies, but we also follow the developments of the wider industry.
In my case, that means that I'm particularly proficient at front-end programming, UX design, presales, teaching, and marketing. Nonetheless, I also do backend programming, all the way down to the protocol and PLC level. For example, a car production factory in Argentina is running my software on the shop floor. For legal reasons, I can't tell much more, but I've collected some key points in a conference talk.
That said, let's shed some light on my vocational hobbies.
I've got decades of experience as a framework programmer. My specialty is not to improve an individual application but an entire application suite. Of course, nowadays, few customers use custom frameworks, but it's still a useful skill helping me a lot when I work with standard frameworks like Spring Boot because I know how they work internally.
I worked on several JSF open-source component libraries for a couple of years - roughly from 2013 to 2018. My first project was AngularFaces. It allowed JSF programmers to explore AngularJS without having to abandon JSF. It was meant to be a migration tool. When Angular 2.0 arrived, I had to abandon the project because the architecture of modern Angular doesn't allow such integration. Instead, I joined another JSF project called BootsFaces.
By the decade's end, it became apparent that JSF was a thing of the past. Angular, React.js, and Vue.js dominate modern front-end development. So I withdrew from the BootsFaces project (without abandoning it entirely) and began a new project: ngx-extended-pdf-viewer. That's the PDF viewer of Firefox, bundled as an Angular component. The success of my library is overwhelming. In 2022, I saw almost 2 million downloads.
In 2019, I started to work a lot with AWS in particular and cloud computing in general. So you'll find an AWS article on this blog every once in a while, and the blog itself runs on AWS.