How I Increased My Subscribers on Substack: Lessons Learned

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In May 2023 I started a new project: The Optimist Engineer. Almost a year already passed but, even though today is not an anniversary or something, I’ve recently achieved an important milestone: Overpass 100 subscribers. But something curious happened and it’s the fact that, since then, the number of subscribers has continued growing and growing in a consistent way daily. In today’s post, I want to share with you how I managed to do so.

Engage!

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Talk in DevOpsDays Madrid 2023

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On Friday, 6th October 2023, it was my pleasure to drive a talk at the conference DevOps Days Madrid 2023. I had the beautiful opportunity to talk about the Lessons Learned Hiring As A Teamwork with Inma Jiménez García and I want to share with you my impressions about the event.

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Talk in Codemotion Madrid 2023

AI Text-To-Speech – Using Play.th API

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ChatGPT and AI are terms that nowadays are all over the place. Wherever you read or watch the news, AI is around. Even though AI is a concept that is much older than ChatGPT, I clearly see an improvement, not only in the text generation with the latest ChatGPT 4 but also in the image generation with Midjourney. Voice generation is not an exception. However, how does it work nowadays at the time to integrate this new technology into our apps and services?

An AI robot reading text and generating voice - From Stable Diffusion
Source: Generated with Stable Diffusion

Today, we can find several products that offer an AI-based Text-To-Speech API, and in the current article, I will create a proof of concept Java application to use the API offered by the startup Play.th. Engage!

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Newsletter incoming! The Optimist Engineer

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I’m thrilled to announce a new project on which I’m working for a while: The Optimist Engineer Newsletter

Logo of The Optimist Engineer Newsletter

This is about sharing experiences, learnings, and growth from the tech industry. People from Software Engineering, Tech Lead, and Engineering Management roles, from Startups and medium-sized companies, could find this initiative interesting for their development and growth. Hoping my journey could help yours.

More newsletter details

What can you expect? All things experiences, learnings, and growth about:

  • Technical Leadership
  • Software Engineering teams
  • Acceleration and Growth of tech companies

Publishing schedule

I plan to release a new issue twice per month, with a ~15 days separation between issues.

Special breaks

  • August. In August, you should not expect any issues delivered
  • End of December. During the last 15 days of December, you should not expect any issues delivered

Cloud Native Asturias Podcast

GraphQL with Micronaut

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GraphQL is an open-source query language that is getting a lot of popularity in the last years and brings some new ways to access information. Because of that, GraphQL is gaining traction among developers due to its flexibility to query and retrieve data. Together with the Micronaut Framework, Software Engineers can deliver value fast and in a decoupled way.

a group of bubbles
Photo by DeepMind

In this article, we will see the incipient power of GraphQL by creating a simple Micronaut-based GraphQL server from the scratch. Engage!

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Implementing Kafka topic consumption in Micronaut

waterfalls under grey sky
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Apache Kafka is one of the most used open-source distributed event streaming platforms when we talk about event-driven microservices architecture. This system brings great features, such as scalability handling, data transformation, and fault-tolerance, among others, that make Apache Kafka so popular for infrastructure, architecture, and developer teams. Micronaut is a modern Java framework, with a very low memory footprint, very suitable for cloud-native Java microservices.

In this article, we will drive a quite simple and fast implementation, that will consume messages from a Kafka topic, thanks to the Micronaut framework and its Micronaut Kafka integration. Engage!

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Introduction to Kubernetes Custom Resources

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Kubernetes is one of the most impactful open-source software in the last 10 years. Among others, it brings the myth(?) dreamed of auto-scalability. Apart from that, a Kubernetes environment is capable to take care of the applications we deploy within it, ensuring the desired state, and trying to keep the zero-downtime status. What about the Kubernetes Custom Resources?

white wind turbines during daytime
Photo by Jason Blackeye

In this article, we will focus on a very powerful feature that Kubernetes provides to its customer, which is the Kubernetes Custom Resources, describing what it is, how to create and manage them, and some use cases. Engage!

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Talking about microservices at Micronaut Podcast 017