I'm active in the IT world since mid 2006, started as a consultant on payroll, but made the switch to freelance consultant after about 7 years. The first projects I've taken part in mainly focussed on Java development and some minor front-end development. After that the focus was on the development of backend systems using Java and the spring framework.
After a brief period of small projects I started on my first assigment in the banking industry, this lasted about 8 years, during that time I took part in a lot of different teams on a lot of different projects covering various aspects of the banking industry. From back office front end applications, to standalone digital signing solutions, to development of security enhancements for the internal framework used at the client. The last project was about processing and distributing financial market data, focus here lies on consolidating of this data and distribute this data in the format needed for the customers.
After 8 years a new opportunity came along and I made the switch to another Belgian bank to start on an assignment in the core banking team, currently lasting almost 10 years. The evolution of the assignment is a bit the same. I took part in a lot of different projects and teams and worked on various applications. We now mainly focus on middleware applications to gather the data from the right sources (backends, external vendors, ...) and send them in an understandable format to our consumers (mostly front end applications). For this we use Apache Camel as an ideal middleware component that allows easy re-use of flows and creates clean and readable code. The last years also included the move to a cloud environment and migrating to a K8s cluster for running the applications. I've learned a lot of new things along the way with the migration to an Azure AKS cluster and did a lot more than only the development of Java applications. We wrote terraform code to deploy our infrastructure, made reusable helm charts to deploy our applications to the K8s cluster and did a lot of automation in Github to ease the deployment of out applications. We've grown as a team more to a devops role than solely taking part in the development of the applications. We also need to find the best Azure components to leverage the re-use of certain components for different applications, taking into account the security and compliance needed for the industry when moving to the cloud. The aim with the move to this cloud platform is to allow easier deployment and upgrades of applications and infrastructure components without any downtime to allow for faster time to market and quick fixing of potential security vulnerabilities or security risks.
I really do enjoy the combination of development of the application and providing the needed cloud infrastructure to deploy the applications on. The benefit of doing both is that you have a better understanding of the needs and pitfalls of both technologies, allowing better alignment of both to allow them to effortlessly work together.