07 January 2018

The year is already seven days old, but it is still time to take a quick look back.

2017 was a great year for me regarding my community activity and the progress of my open source project docToolchain.

This year, I had several chances to talk about Spock & Geb (thanx to DevOpsWuerzburg for inviting me and Tobias Kraft for giving me the chance to be his co-speaker) and Docs-as-Code plus docToolchain (thanx to JAX, the Software Architecture Summit and the JUG Darmstadt for inviting me and to Falk Sippach for combining our talks!). The slides are all available on speakerdeck.

A special thank you goes out to Gernot Starke who helped me to prepare the JAX-Talk and Architecture Summit-Workshop and let me be his co-speaker! Together we also wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Docs as Code as series of articles for the german Java Magazin.

These where all great experience and I hope I can build on these this year. I already have a slot for a talk about docs-as-code at the Entwicklertag Frankfurt and I hope more chances will come up.

The best about all these events where the talks with you - the audience - afterwards and the feedback I could collect. Documentation as a topic seems to be more interesting than I thought and people see that the docs-as-code aproach makes sense.

This is also reflected by the momentum the docToolchain project gained this year. It now has a full blown manual and more than eight contributors who contributed 2017 more features than I did. So it is now a project which is owned by the community - that's a great feeling! Thanx to all of you!

Through the community contributed features, docToolchain gained the ability to export Excel, PPT and Visio. There will soon be a point where I have to split the architecture diagram into several ones:

Speaking of this diagram - docToolchain even managed to be referenced in the newest edition of Gernot Starkes book "Effektive Softwarearchitekturen"!

I nearly forgot to mention that docToolchain was also mentioned by Simon Brown in one tweet together with Grady Booch - isn't that cool?

(btw: I love the C4 approach invented by Simon Brown and his books on Software Architecture for Developers)
I am also very happy that the year gave me lots of chances to meet many of those great people from my twitter time line and talk over a pizza or a beer with them. I learned a lot from all of you!

We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants - in this sense, I would also like to thanx the Asciidoctor, the Apache Groovy and Gradle project teams who all created the wonderful basis for docToolchain.

Hope to see you all again in 2018!