I am a developer advocate with IBM based in Kansas City. Before moving over to developer advocacy I worked as a developer and consultant for over ten years. Over my career I have worked in the fields of insurance regulation, electronic health records, shipping, finance, and government. Working with so many organizations and in different fields has given me a wide breadth of knowledge on challenges common to all organizations and what solutions do and do not work.
One of the passions I bring with me when I join an organization is pushing for the automation of the software development pipeline, better known as Continuous Delivery. Adopting continuous delivery is highly beneficial for organizations of every size and every industry as it addresses many of the issues organizations face; tracking changes, shortening the time between new idea and delivering to production, and increasing the confidence in pushing new changes to production.
When helping organizations adopt continuous delivery I bring particular expertise on the subject of test automation. I have written often on test automation, I speak on it regularly as well, I even published a Pluralsight course on test automation with Spring. Automated testing allows teams to maintain their velocity and keep technical debt to minimum because the of the confidence the tests provide that changes made do not introduce a regression and the process of writing tests itself encourages good design.
Within software development I have specialized in backend development with the Spring Framework. I have gone the specialization route as it allows me to provide better answers on what can and cannot be done and know what solutions are already available rather than spending time reimplementing a solved problem. I have chose Spring over other frameworks as the Spring Framework team and the OSS community have done an incredible not only expanding the capabilities of the framework, but have maintained a high level of excellence, and are readily open and accessible when questions and issues come up.
When I am not writing or talking about software development, I enjoy traveling, watching the Royals and Chiefs (who often break my heart), cycling, and playing kickball.
You can get in contact with Billy via:
- Twitter: @BillyKorando