This isn’t just a reference to an 80’s hairband song, I have decided to go to work for another startup company. It was just over a year ago when we sold Choose and I took my previous role. When I joined that company I expected to be there for a while. I was given a position to lead the architecture of a new system that had been built by a consulting company to replace a legacy system. Technology wise there were a lot of great decisions made with the new architecture that they had. It was a modern Spring Boot stack, composed of micro services.

Introduction

As is tradition on this blog I always lay out some themes to focus on for the upcoming year. These were last years themes if you want to get an idea for the types of things I usually do. I haven’t spent as much time as usual pondering my list this year as I was very busy over my holiday break (at the start with sick kids, and at the end with lots of family activities). Given that today is my last day of vacation I decided it is time to get some things written down. Here are my themes for 2018.

Recap for 2017

Now that I am off of work for the rest of the year I decided that it was a good time to work on my annual year end review for 2017 and see how my year went. This is the post I did at the start of the year for my plan on what I was going to focus on: Themes for 2017.

I am going to start with just an overview of my year and then I will drill down into my themes. 2017 was a whirlwind of a year. In the 4th quarter of 2016 we made a push to make Choose a profitable company. We achieved that by the beginning of the year and in my mind we were going to run hard for another year and really grow the revenue and hopefully sell the company in 2018. Instead the board decided to sell the company in May which led to major changes for me.

I came across this blog post today about using the HTTP Location Header in REST API responses when creating a resource. I have been doing Web development now since 2008 and in all that time I have never actually seen anyone use this header on any of their endpoints.

That being said it makes a lot of sense, traditionally when I would create a new resource I would return the json for that object back in the response so the caller could pull the ID out of the object, but this seems like a better way to do it, as now you could just return your 200 like normal and set this header and not have to send the response body back when the caller knows what they just sent you.

Microservice onboarding…

It has been a crazy couple of months since I took my new role. I have had so much new stuff to learn I haven’t been making a lot of time for other technical pursuits in my spare time. But that being said I am on paternity leave right now, so I figured it was a good time to sit back and reflect on my first couple of months. Similar to Choose the first project that I was asked to work on was to write a new Micro Service. This got me to thinking maybe this is the way to on board a senior engineer.

I haven’t had a chance to update my blog lately as I have been so busy in my new role. That being said I did want to highlight the writing of some of my former coworkers as I think they are writing some great stuff. First check out Kevin Stephen’s blog over at: http://kevindstevens.com/ Kevin is talking about Technology, Growth, and Venture Capital all topics that I find interesting. Also our former Chief Revenue Officer John Tough is blogging over at: http://johntough.com/ John has provided some great stories about the whole acquisition process and even as an employee I learned things that I wasn’t aware of at the time, so I have really enjoyed his writing. My final reading recommendation is Jonathan Crowder over at: https://medium.com/@jonathan.m.crowder He is also writing some great business content. Though JC you really need to host on your own site and not on medium. Own your content man! Anyway check out their posts there is some good stuff there. Going forward I have been playing around with some new stuff in my new role and I plan on discussing some of that going forward.

Today was my last day at choose. What a ride it has been. Thus far it has been my favorite job in my entire career. The quality of the team was top notch and I can’t believe how much software we shipped. The turn around was epic and we just had a ton of fun at work. We took a couple of pictures from our last happy hour.

When I posted my previous post, I left out most of the details about our acquisition as I was not sure what information was public and what wasn’t. Now that there has been some press around the acquisition I figured I would share some of it to provide some details.

First off we had a story in Fortune about Red Ventures acquiring us. After reading that story, I found another story trending on linked in from Green Tech Media. I liked that the Green Tech story had more detail, and since I can’t really talk about anything that isn’t public it is nice to see more details in a public forum.

Wow! That was unexpected after my last post talking about my first year, but we found out on Monday that we were acquired. It is the goal of every startup to be acquired so I am proud to have taken part in a huge turn around of a business to have made that possible. We took a startup company that was losing money when I joined to one that was profitable today, and I was able to work with the strongest engineering team that I have ever worked with in my career which was hugely rewarding.

My First Year

I just celebrated my one year anniversary in my current position, which is a great opportunity to look back on the last year of work. This role has been unlike any other that I have had in my career starting from the interview.

When I was interviewing with my boss and we were discussing what I did in my previous role, I discussed the architecture that we had built. It was a traditional Spring application that was a monolith. It was a very well designed layered architecture. We were doing a mix Trunk Based Development and feature branch development depending on how large and invasive the feature was using git as the repository. We had a great unit test suite and did weekly deployments. We tried to commit early to master and use feature toggles to role out new features and mitigate risk. They were still largely a waterfall model though, just a company that moved faster on waterfall than any I have ever worked with.