Recently the first Mendix book was published. It was titled Building Low-Code Applications with Mendix: Discover best practices and expert techniques to simplify enterprise web development by Bryan Kenneweg, Imran Kasam, and Micah McCullen. It guides the reader to become an application developer on the Mendix platform. This book inspired me also to contribute to growing and educating this unique low-code community.
What drives me?
I joined the Mendix company in 2012, fresh out of university. Since then, I was convinced Mendix was onto something. A strong player that could change the way the business perceives IT: slow and costly. With almost ten years of Mendix experience, I firmly believe I’m the perfect person to take you and your freshly built application through an unforgettable journey. From proof of concept to modern enterprise landscape. The sole goal is for me to share my experience, which hopefully propels you to success. Not just building and delivering apps at record speed, but also reliably so that you can sleep at night like a lamb.
One step at a time
Instead of spending a year writing the book in silence, I’m taking a slightly different approach. With this article, I’d like to set the stage for a series of blog posts that will address the various challenges after your Mendix app is built. Let’s face it, Mendix does solve many application development challenges for you. But there’s still a lot that you need to take care of. Especially if your organization sets high standards for availability, quality, and control. The intention is to finally bundle these blog posts into a book to be published in 2022.
Who is the audience?
There’s a massive gap between Mendix application developers and infrastructure/cloud/DevOps engineers responsible for the infrastructure. The time of handing over your application to an operations team is over. Today you are expected to operate your app. With this book, I hope to close that gap so that application development, delivery, and operations become a synergy that enables the successful adoption of Mendix in organizations of all sizes. As such, the material discussed here is also relevant for decision-makers looking to adopt or evaluate Mendix. Think of CEO, CTO, line managers, architects, security, and risk specialists.
What can you expect?
Here’s a sneak peek of subjects that will be visited during this journey:
- Anatomy and core concepts of a Mendix application model
- Deployment package, what is it, and what are the flavors?
- Cloud deployment platforms and their maturity.
- Agile & DevOps with Mendix, what does it mean?
- How shall you test Mendix apps?
- What does security mean with regard to Mendix apps?
- Scaling Mendix apps, how? Horizontal and vertical
- What are common bottlenecks?
- Which database shall I use?
- Disaster recovery
- Licensing models
- Blue-green deployment with Mendix, is it a myth?
- How do you grow a single PoC into a microservices landscape?
If there are subjects you’d love to see, feel free to reach out to me. You can also contribute with your chapters.
Storyline
The book follows the fictional story of Steven Cheng, a jack-of-all-trades architect at CINAQ enterprise with a strong sense of ownership. Steven’s journey with Mendix started when he learned about the platform in 2020 via a LinkedIn-promoted advertisement.
Fast forwarded 1 year, CINAQ is powered by hundreds microservices with significant of them built with Mendix. The business is thriving, innovating and staying ahead of the competition.
Interested to know how the story unfolds? Follow my social media channels at the bottom of this page.