From Gorillas to AWS CDK
From airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien by Adam Bien
March 4, 2026 · 54 min · Episode 386
About this episode
The episode features a conversation with Thorsten Hoeger about his programming journey from QBasic to Java and various software development experiences.
An airhacks.fm conversation with Thorsten Hoeger ( @hoegertn ) about: first computer experience with an IBM 8086 and learning programming by modifying the QBasic Gorilla game, early programming journey from QBasic to Visual Basic and the discovery of event-driven programming, building a password security script for autoexec.bat as a childhood project, transition from Visual Basic to Java around 2005 starting with Java 1.4.2, working at a small bank in Stuttgart building a core banking system, experience with Eclipse RCP rich client platform and the overhead of plugin architecture in business software, migration from Swing to Eclipse RCP frontend with JBoss application server backend, building a custom Spring-based microservice framework called Dwallin (Icelandic for dwarf) before Spring Boot existed, using Apache CXF for REST and RPC over messaging with ActiveMQ , comparison of Java development trajectories between annotation-based and XML-heavy approaches, discussion of the infamous Java and XML O'Reilly book that popularized XML configuration, xdoclet as a precursor to Java annotations, contrasting approaches of JBoss-based thin WAR deployments versus Spring-based embedded…
People in this episode
Host: Adam Bien
Guest: Thorsten Hoeger
Topics covered
- programming journey
- Java development
- microservices
- Eclipse RCP
- event-driven programming
- software architecture
Keywords
- IBM 8086
- QBasic
- Visual Basic
- Java 1.4.2
- Eclipse RCP
- Spring Boot
- microservices
- OSGi
- ActiveMQ
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: IBM, Visual Basic, Java, Eclipse RCP, JBoss, Spring, Apache CXF, ActiveMQ, OSGi, PL/SQL
Books & works: Java and XML O'Reilly book, xdoclet
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