Continuous improvement

Every few years I like to take a couple of weeks out of the working world to learn about techniques and technologies that are approaching the mainstream.

When I first moved to London back in 2008 I had to learn all about Spring and Hibernate as the local job market was mainly fixated on those technologies.

After the recession cooled down a bit I found my way into a development role based on Hybris - an e-commerce system held together by Spring.

Fast forward to 2012, before joining Springer I dabbled in accessing some youtube APIs to see what would be involved in establishing a degrees of separation relationship between music videos via their related videos.  That was a bit of fun and gave me some insight into some simple performance optimisation options in distributed systems:

• divide the work up and allocate it to a pool of workers
• have the workers share a small piece of information to prevent duplication of effort (checking videos that had already been visited).

At around the same time I took an interest in nosql databases.  After attending the inaugural London Data Bar meetup group, I won a ticket to a two day hands on NoSQL databases conference which gave me a chance to dabble with neo4j and MongoDB.

For 2015 I'm taking a dabble in open source products, seeing how they work, contributing some code and improving some documentation along the way.