Preparing for interviews versus skating to where the puck is going to be

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been." - Wayne Gretsky

I'm in the process of seeking out a new challenge in my career (no need to whisper - I've left my previous job on good terms and taken a nice long holiday - so I'm not sneaking around to speak to recruiters during work time).

While updating my CV I have been quite aware that once again I find myself without professional experience of the latest popular technology in my sector - Kubernetes ... and maybe Kafka.

It's very tempting to go away and complete a full-on course to fill in the gaps, but I've been in the industry for long enough to appreciate that there's still a reasonable chance that my next role might not include those technologies anyway.

So, for now I'll just have to find the right balance of revising what I already know, and reading about and watching videos about enough to be able to carry my end of a conversation.

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.