A dream come true .teaching - Professional Java developer: Tools and best practices

I always enjoyed sharing knowledge. One of the reasons I blog is to share my knowledge on things around my job as a software engineer. Founding and running (with a handful of friends) the first Java User Group in Greece back in 2003, was due to the fact that we could not get sufficient training or access to personal development around our work, so we wanted to share and re-use the knowledge we had as a small developer community. When I get to work, at any job, in any place, one of the things I look for during my first days, is how much knowledge is there for me, so I can read and get up to speed. I always enjoy, training young developers, show them what I know, bringing them up to speed, shaping their developer personality.

I am really happy and excited that in a month's time I am going to fulfill a big dream, teaching. I am not an academic, I am a professional, a software engineer and under this context I am going to share some views, experiences and knowledge, in a short course at the City University of London. You can find the link here . The title is Professional Java developer: Tools and best practices. My main goal is not to become a teacher, for me the whole initiative is mostly giving back some of my passion and love for my work as a software engineer, to people that are willing to walk the same road and join me-us in the software development market/world.

The course's main target is to infuse the experiences and standards of today's Java developer job market into a short course. I am planning a more hand's on learning experience, with an opinionated agenda rather a classic academic computer science course, that you will get as an undergraduate computer science student. I want to provide (as much as possible) the main skills and knowledge that any junior Java developer is nice to have and be familiar with, when he/she joins for the first time a company, and a software development team. At least introduce them and then let the student expand on this knowledge.

The agenda and course content is almost finalized (with some minor exceptions) but I am planning to go through topics like

• Modern Java IDE's - using effectively a Java IDE
• Using code versioning tools like Git.
• Latest Java language's features.
• Build tools for the Java related, walking through the basics of Maven or Gradle.
• Testing with Java, using frameworks and libraries towards test driven or behavior driven development
• Modern enterprise development with Java, a walk through to the available enterprise level micro frameworks, like Spring Boot, Wildfly Swarm, Vertx etc.
• Development of RestFul API's in Java, using available tools and libraries.
• Cloud and Devops tools for the Java developer, a walk through tools like Vagrant, Docker, Amazon Webservices, the cloud.
• Coding dojo's where we will investigate and learn about, _famous' Java libraries that you're most probably going to use in your Job and it would be nice to know about them.
• Tips and exercises similar to many interviews questions a junior java developer might encounter during his/her job hunt.

The course is suitable for different kinds of people

• Computer science undergraduates that are preparing to enter the market
• IT professionals that they want to have a quick intro to the practices and tooling of the Java world
• Non IT professionals that are converging to the IT industry and specifically to software development using Java - but are already familiar to developing code with Java

I am very excited, I hope we could start on the 8th of October (assuming that there is enough interest and students). The class is going to be every Saturday from 10 to 5 (or so) and is a 5 part course, meaning 5 Saturdays.

Special thanks to my friend Dionisis Dimakopoulos, who eventually was the one that had the idea and gave me this opportunity, to share my passion through this course.