2018 - Ace & Tate

Ace & Tate is a very prominent Dutch eye-wear company. I worked there for 4 months in a team of three, with the task of going live with a new backend service powered by Scala and Lagom (a microservices framework developed by Lightbend). The deployment was to be on Google Cloud and their relatively recent managed Kubernetes service GKE.

The company was very young and so was the average age of the employees. We techies, with our very minimalist desks, were surrounded by design teams working on new glass models, store enrichment, posters or advertisement. Definitely one of the most colorful office I have ever set foot in.

Four months are all it took for this little success story. We were able to go live and replace the legacy system, an organically grown patchwork using both Magento (PHP) and Solidus (Ruby).

Other important items, in random order, have been:

• Event Storming
• Domain Driven Design
• Always-on streams with Akka Stream (mostly for integrations with third party systems)
• Hexagonal architecture
• Clustering of services

At the end of 2018 I spoke at a lot of conferences, together with my buddy Adam Sandor, and one of the most glamorous pictures of us on stage was taken at the Google DevFest. I was wearing the Ace & Tate sweater 🙂

I did have an amazing time at Ace & Tate, a really fun project in a fun environment. Another perk was that their wonderful office was only a brisk 6-minute bicycle ride from my house!