Want to be a MuleSoft Champion? Join today!
At MuleSoft, we are very lucky to have a large developer community who have inspired us, driven us forward, and contributed to our growth and success in many ways. The people who make up this community are dedicated to the success and development of its members. One of the most dedicated community champions is Anirban Sen Chowdhary, Analyst Programmer in Hyderabad, India. He has contributed a great deal to help others use and get to know MuleSoft, while applying his own MuleSoft knowledge to a great position at a top global bank.
“I like my job,” says Anirban. “I work in innovation and development. My job revolves around integrating different systems together, gathering requirements and creating different applications to automate different manual tasks within the process, creating and implementing different APIs and services, and setting up, implementing, maintaining, and upgrading different systems and servers within the organization architecture. Becoming proficient with MuleSoft has been an important skill in growing my career.”
“When I started with MuleSoft things weren’t as easy as they are now,” Anirban says.
“There was very little documentation and information on MuleSoft and the docs were not as concrete as they are now. I still remember when I typed ‘Mule tutorial’ on Google and the results showed an image of a real mule (or maybe a donkey) with a title ‘How to train your Mule!‘ There were Stack Overflow and Mule forums where we could find help, but still it was not the active and vibrant community we have today.”
Yet, Anirban stuck with it and the community that grew up around MuleSoft turned out to be a big support network. “The Mule community is really important,” he says. “I have gradually seen it grow and today it is one of the best developer communities around. There are lots of materials (videos, blogs, slides, forums) available that help anyone to get on-boarded easily. Today I can find lot more people actively participating and helping others around in the community. I believe this is a big reason for Mule’s success and huge popularity. With such an active community, it’s just easier for more people to use MuleSoft and help each other with it.”
Anirban notes that one of his biggest challenges as a developer is integrating software. “Integration projects are definitely full of challenges,” he notes. “There are a lot of different systems involved — especially legacy systems, which you can’t change and have very little control over. Often, you don’t have any option other than designing your application to accommodate and integrate them.”
“When I started exploring Mule about five years ago, I had very little idea about how this tool is going to handle the complex integrations with different systems,” Anirban recalls. “We were hoping to find a tool that would make designing complex applications less painful. We had newly acquired a project for one of our clients, a big luxury mobile phones manufacturer.”
“Since the project was on an SOA architecture involving a lot of web services (both SOAP and REST), we wanted to implement it in a new way that can help us to expose or consume services easily with minimum effort in developing and maintaining. We wanted to explore this emerging tool called MuleSoft that would integrate all the different systems together easily.”
“As we went deep into it, we found it wonderful,” Anirban noted. “Since MuleSoft was a Java-based framework it was easy for me to pick up. I have seen different versions of Mule all these years and found it amazing right from its on-premises product to CloudHub. Mule connects systems with minimum effort and coding. I knew it was the “next big thing” in the integration world. It has made connecting systems easy.”
“It also makes the world of APIs and implementing microservices easy. Anypoint Platform is bundled with different products where we can manage the full API lifecycle, expose proxy services for backend applications, host our applications both in the cloud as well as on-premises, and much more. I expect that MuleSoft will play an important part in my future work.”
Anirban is enthusiastic about how being a MuleSoft Champion will help him in his own work and professional development. “With MuleSoft, I was able to achieve a lot of successful projects that we have successfully delivered to customers,” he says. “One of my greatest achievements is when I was appointed as the “MuleSoft Champion” in 2015 for my knowledge and my contributions in the community. I probably was the first one from the Asia/India region.”
“It was then followed by ‘RAML MVP‘ from the RAML community in 2016. The MuleSoft Champions program has given me the platform to contribute to the community through various ways. It also helped to keep me motivated and updated with the latest changes in MuleSoft and its related technologies.”And yes, it’s helped me to complete all the Mule certifications available!”
Since Anirban has been MuleSoft-certified 5 times, he is definitely an exceptional MuleSoft developer! Want to follow in his footsteps? Check out MuleSoft’s community and gain the support you need to become proficient with MuleSoft and grow your career. And take a look at our Champions program, where top MuleSoft developers can redeem swag, training and certification exams, while completing challenges to prove and grow their MuleSoft skills. Join today!
