This blogpost will briefly describe what message queues are, how and where this technology will be used and as I promised in my previous blogpost, and here it is. 🙌

Let’s tackle this topic with:

What are message queues in the first place? 📤 ✉️ 📥

Message queues are used to decouple applications by adding a common communication layer, that makes applications communicate over this layer rather than peer to peer. The message could possibly be anything that can be saved as simple text. An application or a software sends a message to the message queue where it's being stored until an application or software takes the message off again. There are several technologies that gets the job done but one of the most famous ones, nowadays, is RabbitMQ.
This is a very brief explanation, so bear with me if it’s simplified too much because I don't want to deepdive in the basics too much.

To put the advantages of message queuing in a nutshell:

• Fault tolerance 😶 because, if one system breaks for whatever reason another system can still send messages to the queue
• Improve scalability 😮 because, if there is a unexpected load on an application you can create multiple instances of this application to balance the load and it will easily use message queues for communication
• Decrease latency 😲 because, since messages are being sent asynchronously, systems don't have to wait for each other before finishing a cross-system task

How am I going to use message queues?

There is a framework called Sylius, which I will not be explaining. If you are interested in it, but don't want to spend hours reading their doc, have a look at one of Lukas' software evualuation post about Sylius. Basically, this framework is an eCommerce framework which is based on Symfony. People that know Symfony, know symfonies bundle-system.
For the others: You can extend Symfony applications easily by adding bundles. Bundles can be seen like plugins to a Symfony application. There is an open-source bundle called “SyliusImportExportPlugin”. As the name implies, you can import and export data of the eCommerce application with this bundle. The main topic of my bachelor’s thesis is, to add a mq system into this import/export plugin and see how the mq system affects the latency, scalability and fault tolerance by doing benchmarks.
The following (beautiful) drawing illustrates the changes I'll be doing to the bundle:

The regular file export and the red part will be benchmarked and implifications will be discussed in my scientific paper.
I will make a follow up post about the benchmarks, findings, as well as the comparison before and after my project.

Why did I choose this subject?

I liked the subject because it gives me the opportunity, to learn something about a solution, to the problem of having no fault tolerance, not being able scale and systems having the need of wait for each other. Two different systems talking to each other is not an easy task. Before having message queues: An admin had to export data from the system to a file and then (bestcase) import the file without changing anything to another system. By queuing messages, this task can be automated.

"Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people."

• Steve Jobs

Thanks to everyone that is helping me with working on the bundle and in addition for helping me on my way to graduation.
Thanks to Michael Weibel and Fabian Ryf for helping me with this blogpost.
You guys are all 🔥

This May I started working at Liip. A lot of my fellow students and friends are asking me: Why would you take that route back and forth every day if you can just do it somewhere near? 🤷
This is actually a very reasonable and good question which hopefully will be answered by the end of this post. (Spoiler: No, the answer is not the juicy swiss-wage everyone thinks of 🤑)

My daily route

Figure 1: Here you can see the route I’d be taking if I was walking. Sure, let me swim across the lake real quick. 🏊‍
The route is about 80km (about 50 miles) if I was driving by car. Instead of driving by car, I am taking the train though. I’ll elaborate on why I take the train instead of driving myself later in this post.
Long talk short: It takes me 3 transfers to reach the Liip office in Zurich and about 2h one way. Which makes a total of about 4h every day to the office and back.
A lot time, isn’t it? Read along.

How I got to Liip and why I chose to send an application to this company

Side note: I already knew, I wanted to do my graduation thesis at a company. Also, what was clear to me is I wanted to go in the web-development direction. The question was just: Which company do I want to do it at?

I have already known about Liip through their open source contributions, such as their PHP one-line installation or their LiipImagineBundle. There is plenty of more open source contributions. I just picked two of which I had used in the past myself and still use from time to time.
Further, I did some research and noticed the awards the company has. One example for this is: Liip achieved the top 5 medium-sized companies.
This was enough to convince myself, to take the opportunity, to write a mail regarding and asking as of if it’s possible to write my thesis at this company.
After a little back and forth mailing, video-calling and explaining how writing a graduation Thesis at a company works, I was invited to come by for an interview. So I went for it, and it all went successful. 🎉

To put it in a nutshell: I don’t know about any other company having open source contributions which I have been using. Other than that, it’d be hard beating the award count. Also, I’d be lying if I said Zurich didn’t look cool on my CV(right? :D).

"I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."

• Elon Musk

What is my topic and why it was an impact of my choice to this company

I was beforehand told that if I will be working at Liip, it’ll most likely be an open source bundle (which I find to be cool to support open source) regarding the eCommerce framework Sylius.
ECommerce gets more and more important as more and more people are shopping online instead of walking to the shops. I want to use this as an opportunity to get more knowledge in this area.
More about my topic, to follow, on another blogpost. :)

Why I am taking the train and how I am compensating for the travel time

As earlier mentioned I take the train every time I go to the Zurich Office, which takes like 2h one way. This is mostly the point where people roll their eyes and is the reason for them to reject such an opportunity.
First of all, what do people usually do when being in the train. I see mostly people hang on their phone, probably check out the same post in their social media over and over again until they eventually arrive. I told myself I don’t want to do this, so instead I read books.
Yeah, correct. I think for people that get distracted fast of reading books this is a good opportunity to (kind of) force yourself to read. 📖
Another big option is, since I am working on a Laptop I can start working in the train already, so I’d work less in the office and go back home earlier again. 💻
Every time I get into the train I tell myself: Why pull out your phone if you can be productive instead?
Not only are you using your time on the way when you are taking the train, but you also help the environment. 🌍

An overview of the advantages of taking the train over the car:

TLDR; I chose Liip because of their open source contributions and I wanted to have a contribution too. I am using the train time to read books and start working in the train. There is no time-waste when I am reading or working on my laptop. Also, you help the environment by taking the train over the car.