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Jonathan Schneider
CTO at Apixio; Product and technology leader
Jonathan Schneider can best be described as a versatile and accomplished software engineer with over 8 years' worth of leadership experience in the US Army. He is the co-founder and CEO of a Stealth Mode Startup with a focus on engineering productivity and monitoring. Jonathan is also an author with an upcoming publication, "SRE with Java Microservices," available in early access through O'Reilly. He has worked in various software engineering roles throughout his career, including senior software engineer at Gradle and Netflix, senior engineering manager, and principal software engineer at Pivotal Software, Inc. Additionally, he has experience in Android development and programming.
Jonathan earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Truman State University. He has expertise in engineering tools, monitoring, and delivery automation, and powerfully combines this with his leadership background to create a unique skill set.
Highlights
I founded OpenRewrite at Netflix because we had a huge problem maintaining the thousands of repositories that made up our tech stack. Why didn't I stay there?
I had a very honest skip level 1:1 with Yury Izrailevsky, who was the VP of Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering at that time. When I started to pitch the idea of expanding the team he shut it down quickly. I was disappointed at the time but this was a formative experience for me.
Because Netflix, as influential as it was, was just one company and one team. And large scale migration really needs an up-and-down the stack participation from a whole language community. It's not just Netflix projects that need migration, it's the entire language community around it. Yury was 10000% right that Netflix couldn't be the locus of this effort.
We're increasingly seeing signs that OpenRewrite ultimately is that up-and-down-the-stack solution. It has broad support outside of any one bubble. Really most significantly BECAUSE it isn't in one of those bubbles. It is even expanding outside the bubble of the JVM (as large as that is) and IaaC, with its recent introduction of C# support. And the Moderne team has been working literally around the clock adding our next language. We'll be announcing in September 😉.
Another day, another mention of an #OpenRewrite recipe being used in a migration, this time in an effort to uplift Jakarta EE applications to the most recent version.
What I appreciate about this article is its balance and nuance. It actually lists Eclipse Transformer as the better option for this migration because it has a greater degree of completeness than the equivalent OpenRewrite recipes. That's not to say that the OpenRewrite recipe couldn't do all the same things if somebody wrote the recipes, but this community decided to lean into Eclipse Transformer instead.
To take the broader perspective, there is a reason why I didn't continue trying to build a team around OpenRewrite at Netflix. Because Netflix, as influential as it was, was just one company and one team. And large scale migration really needs an up-and-down the stack participation from a whole language community. It's not just projects from Eclipse that need to participate, but those from outside that bubble as well.
And that's where I think OpenRewrite ultimately will have the advantage -- it has broad support outside of any one bubble. It is even expanding outside the bubble of Java (as large as that is), with its recent introduction of C# support.
And we're announcing yet another language being added in September. And it's an important one 😀.
