Emmanouil Gkatziouras is the author of A Developer’s Essential Guide to Docker Compose, we got the chance to sit down and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
E: I am specialised on architecting Cloud applications mostly based on Java.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt?
E: I was a big fan of Docker Compose since it helps me on my day to day tasks. When Packt approached me with an opportunity to write a book about it, I was very happy since I saw it as an opportunity to give back to the community as well as help individuals who could benefit from it.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
E: The research was close to 1 month, part of it was focused on understanding extra features that Compose has and are not as widespread.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
E: Since it was the first book writing with this publisher, the challenge was mainly understanding the processes and tools the publisher used. The publisher helped me to overcome those challenges from the beginning, making the process productive and efficient.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
E: The technologies used were Docker, Compose, Go, Redis, Prometheus, Terraform, AWS, Azure. I firmly believe that more companies will migrate to the Cloud in the future and get advantage of the managed services provided there. Cloud adoption comes along with Infrastructure as Code, by using Terraform it is possible to efficiently provision and manage resources to the cloud at scale. The choice of Go was not a random one, the simplicity of it can help a Developer Getting started fast and Deploy an application in no time. It is common nowadays to see teams opting to Go for the reasons described above.
Q. Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
E: The book takes the reader from writing the first lines of code for an application, towards deploying that application to the Cloud. In essence it provides the user a guide for Docker Compose and its usage through developing an actual application, adding monitoring, using CI/CD tasks and provisioning the infrastructure needed to deploy the application to the Cloud. Essentially the reader will get to learn about Compose through various aspects faced during the workday.
Q: What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
E: Once a reader has finished the book, it should be easier to tackle everyday problems that include multiple software components which can be used along with Docker. A team’s productivity can be increased by leveraging this newly acquired knowledge.The benefits of using Compose will not stop only in the development phase. Instead Compose could be used for an actual production application running on the Cloud.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
E: Blogs are great to get up to date, books definitely give well rounded knowledge and videos can get you up to speed with a certain technology. I actually use all of those ways for different goals of learning. Recently I’ve realised that a great way to learn is by studying open source projects. GitHub is a big place of information and provided you can navigate on the source code of a project you can get all the answers that you want from the actual source. It is pretty interesting that nowadays instead of searching on the internet for answers sometimes I will go straight to the source code.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
E: Yes they can find me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/gkatziourasemmanouil/.
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
E: Docker on GitHub is the Golden source of information. This is were things are built
https://github.com/docker
Overall the Packt website. There is a wide range of books to pick that are related to Docker that can enhance the experience and bring your knowledge to a new level.
Also My blog references Compose a lot for certain examples since it is one of my favorite tools
http://egkatzioura.com/
Q. How would you describe your author’s journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
E: I would definitely recommend Packt. On every step of this book writing journey they will assist you and help you to become better. Also thanks to their editing efforts, they ensure that the product will be readable by users and understood. They have high quality standards which is reassuring for an author. Actually, I would be definitely interested in authoring more books with the editor based on my first experience.
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
E: I am a core member of DZone
https://dzone.com/users/1016019/Emmanouil_Gkatziouras.html
Also thanks to my contributions to InfluxDB I am an InfluxDB ace
https://www.influxdata.com/blog/community-showcase/influxaces/emmanouil-gkatziouras/
Apart from that you can always find me attending some of London’s popular Meetups such as the `London Java Group`.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
E: I really like Dzone. They have a good way of aggregating content that you can browse and pick what might suit your needs. After that point my goto way is actually reading a book or studying an online course.
You can find Emmanouil’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
