Bernd Rücker is Co-Founder of Camunda, the Open source platform for BPMN workflow and DMN decision automation.
He started developing software more than 15 years ago, and shared his expertise by co-authoring Real-Life BPMN: Using BPMN 2.0 to Analyze, Improve, and Automate Processes in Your Company, a popular book about workflow modelling and automation.
Bernd will deliver a talk about Software Architecture at Codemotion Berlin 2018.
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Bernd, during your career you coached countless real-life software projects and helped many customers to implement business logic centred around long-running flows. For example, the order process of the rapidly growing startup Zalando selling clothes worldwide or the provisioning process for e.g. SIM cards at a couple of big telecommunication companies.
Also, you contributed to various open source workflow engines. How would you define yourself and your job?
I am “the workflow guy”. I studied software engineering and started my own business all whilst I was still studying. I got in touch with workflow engines and got passionate about the whole topic. Since then I have contributed to various open source engines and have couched countless customers using these tools. I have worked on the relevant standard in that field (BPMN) and wrote a book on it. The great thing is that the company I co-founded now has a very successful open source workflow engine on the market – so I can continue doing what I love for a living.
When did you start coding for the very first time?
I learned Basic very early when I was in school and soon got into Turbo Pascal. Then I coded a lot for fun, e.g. a Scrabble game among other things. I continued with Delphi, did some things in Visual Basic, tried to avoid C and C++ and jumped on Java soon. Nowadays I mostly program in Java, JS, C# or Go.
What’s your job? Why did you choose this job?
In my current role as developer advocate I write articles or speak at conferences a lot, but still do a technical proof of concepts or solution design sessions with customers to know the real word. So that means I do still write code in the POC’s or for demos – which I love doing – it is a good way to relax.
How did you manage to transform your passion into a successful career?
I started my own company and was very persistent about certain things, but I also had tons of luck.
What has been the biggest challenge you have ever met?
Leading people 🙂
Who could use these technologies you are developing in Camunda? Are you used to eat your own dog food?
I basically look at how state handling is required to solve a couple of challenges you get in distributed systems. In order to make concrete code examples, I use the open source engine Camunda as a lightweight state machine. As this is our own open source project I also talk about which other options are on the market as I want to focus on the concepts – not the concrete tool.
I personally think that this state handling will be huge in the future with ever increasing architectures that are more and more distributed. For example transactions, there are no ACID transactions in this world – you have to care about consistency yourself using appropriate strategies that almost always involve state handling.
At Codemotion Berlin, you are going to talk about microservices. Where did the idea of doing this talk come about?
A lot of our customers are moving towards architectures that are highly distributed systems (e.g. microservices) and I see a lot of projects struggle with challenges of the distributed systems world. I wrote about this on InfoWorld and also made a talk out of it.
Do you have any suggestion for our attendees on how to stay updated on the latest technologies?
Nothing very special, check the known tech news sites or follow the right people on Twitter. And of course, go to meetups or conferences regularly!
What’s the most inspiring music that you listen to while you are programming?
None 😉 I actually enjoy the silence while programming whenever possible. AndCodemotion Berlin 2018. since I have kids I do enjoy every moment of silence even more…
Bernd will talk about 3 Common Pitfalls in Microservice Integration during Codemotion Berlin Tech Conference, from November 20 to 21. Join and meet him!
