At the start of 2015 I set myself a goal to contribute more to the worldwide Java community. Getting involved in community discussions, forums and social media. Responding to more questions on Stackoverflow.com. Contributing to an open source project (I’m still yet to choose which one(s)). I also started open sourcing some of the work I’ve been doing in my spare time.

As a result of open sourcing one particular project on GitHub, I was contacted by Stormpath, asking if they could feature my project on their website.

Stormpath is:

“… a User Management API specialising in Authentication, OAuth, Custom User Data, SSO and Authorization. A Complete User System. In Minutes.”

It’s really easy to get up and running, and removes the need to develop a huge part of an application (User Management) that is necessary, but not part of the business logic.

Just quietly, I was pretty stoked. Stormpath organised a phone interview to go through my web application, and to see how and why I was using their API for user management and security.

After a few months of no contact I thought they must have moved on to bigger and better things, but a little over two weeks ago they emailed again with a draft of the blog post (to which I eagerly gave the thumbs up). Early last week the write up went live! You can view the entire article here: Exploring Microservices Architectures With Stormpath.

The concept that the more you give, the more you get in return, is a strange concept to grasp. And it’s one that has taken me a long time to realise. But I can’t believe how powerful it really is. I’ll certainly be giving to the Java and developer community a lot more in the future.

Your thoughts? I'd love to hear them. Please get in contact.