WG - Bring junior developers to Java and Quarkus

[brunobat]

Objective:

Make Java and Quarkus more appealing to students and junior software developers.

The Problem:

In most universities Python teaching is prevalent and they provide limited curriculums in the fields of Java and microservices in general.
Even when Java is taught, it's usually the boring and outdated pre Java 8 flavour. The Java programming language has evolved but not the way it's thought.
Students also have very limited knowledge about terminals, build tools and tests in general, which makes Quarkus understanding a challenge to them.

The proposed Solution:

There are two lines of action that we want to pursuit. Issues that make Java programming more appealing and issues that expand the usage of Quarkus into younger audiences.

These are some ideas to help solve the problem:

• Bring Java and Quarkus to new audiences by creating Small videos on Twitch
• Documentation that is more focused on what is the problem to solve
• Provide guidance on the recommended way to use Quarkus.
• Why we use certain patterns, how we use them and maybe provide a microservice reference implementation to illustrate it.
• Dedicate Quarkus content to IoT hobbyists
• Dev UI - Step by step tutorial on most common things
• Better logging. Logging that helps solving the issue at hand.
• Better advertising... thinking on the Minecraft extension!

Some other issues are not clear enough how they can be solved:

• How to bring the Latest Java to universities?
• How to simplify getting into Java?
• How can we make some pieces of Quarkus simpler to understand?
• What can we do to make Quarkus easier to use?

-------> Ideas are welcome!

Definition of Done:

The issues we commit to in Milestone 1 are implemented.

Scope of Work

This is a brainstorm working group... Not much is out of scope if it contributes to the objective in a sensible way.

Organizing the Work

1. Communication and Transparency:

This discussion will spin off implementation issues.
Coordination per topic will be done in the relevant project's GitHub issues.

2. Point of Contact:

@brunobat

3. Expected Timeline:

• - Milestone 1 - Discuss what activities can be implemented, create issues and find assignees to them.
• - Milestone 2 - Implement issues.
• - Milestone 3 - Evaluate effects and if more issues are needed.

[cescoffier]

Hey!

Should we move this forward?

For the dev service WG, I'm using an async "brainstorming" technique based on a shared Google presentation where interested parties can add sticky notes with ideas. Then, someone (voluntarily chosen :-)) can cluster and discuss the priorities.

So, the first deliverable of this WG would be the result of this brainstorming, identifying the quick win in the overall plan of action.

WDYT?

[brunobat]

ok, how doe we kickstart that?

[brunobat]

CC @holly-cummins @radcortez

[phillip-kruger]

Can I be involved ?

[brunobat]

Sure! Anyone can :)

[stephan-strate]

Can non core developers get involved?

[cescoffier]

Can non core developers get involved?

Yes! Of course! Working groups are opened to everyone.

[stephan-strate]

How to bring the Latest Java to universities?

I could imagine offering workshops about java and quarkus at universities. Although I'm only familiar with structure and organisation of universities in germany, I don't know if it's possbile in other countries aswell.

[brunobat]

In here I imagine a couple of approaches:

• Create a workshop on how to quickly bootstrap an HTTP server and use it in projects.
• Create a MicroServices course using Quarkus capabilities.

How to spread the work in universities, that's another story...

[brunobat]

Probably we need to try to involve Universities on this WG...

[alcides]

As a Software Engineering professor in Portugal, our goal is more to focus on concepts rather than technologies. More and more curricula are including micro services in either Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Large Scale Software Development or Software Architecture. Regardless of the course, micro services are not the only topic, and we spend 1 to 3 weeks around those concepts (meaning 1.5 - 4.5 hours of labs).

The choice of technology used is usually determined by a few factors (weights vary between universities):

• How familiar the instructors are with the technology (language and framework)
• How familiar students are with the underlying language/tooling (Java is a popular language in Portuguese CS degrees)
• The quality and quantity of learning materials available online — we don't want to spend office hours with 100s of students debugging configuration files, or nasty interoperability bugs. Stackoverflow is a good measure of this support. Good tutorials are also appreciated.
• How popular it is in the industry (less important, but usually correlated with the previous point).

As you might understand, Python is also a popular language for prototyping micro services using flask or django (some also use Go for the same purpose). We do not really care about the advanced features as we do not have time to explore them. We care about getting students to play with this, and working on a smallish project to assess whether they know how to design micro services.

My suggestion would be to pick a course with someone who wouldn't mind exploring the use of Quarkus, and create materials that others can use:

1. A medium-size micro service project with fake data, but real requirements. This would be available online.
2. A set of additional features that can be done as part of a project that requires adding a new micro service and integrating with others.
3. A new project that would require implementing a new project from scratch using micro services. If using Github classroom, it could be easily adopted by others, with grading integration. I see automatic testing here more as helping students, as our assessment focus more on the right choice of architecture.

Some courses where using Quarkus might make sense:

• https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/training/design-guidelines-patterns-microservices/
• https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/training/designing-modern-service-based-systems/
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/applications-development-microservices-serverless-openshift

These are courses focused on micro services. In more traditional courses, you have 1 week of micro services, and that's not enough to see enough of Quarkus. Maybe run a tutorial in the labs?

[brunobat]

Thanks for the insights @alcides!

[brunobat]

We need a page dedicated to dev mode.
We have a section of a doc here: https://quarkus.io/guides/maven-tooling#dev-mode
and a page on the differences between dev mode and prod: https://quarkus.io/guides/dev-mode-differences

[TOP-OWN]

I'm learning quarkus, but I can't understand the different extensions, For example, the difference between the first and second in https://quarkus.io/extensions/?search-regex=elytron%20security. I read some books, but the extensions are missing.

[brunobat]

CC @sberyozkin

[sberyozkin]

@TOP-OWN, the common module is reused between several extensions. Would you like to open a separate discussion as this one is more about bringing junior developers ?