I just signed up to take the Stanford Machine Learning Course for free on Coursera. Anyone who wants to take the course with me is welcome to join me over here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning. They are only accepting enrollments until January 12th I think it said so not much time left to sign up.
As is my tradition it is time to review 2018 and see how my year unfolded. The first thing that I always do is review my themes for the year and see how many of them I hit.
In general 2018 was an interesting year. The year started out with me on vacation. When I was on vacation I realized that I would have to change jobs in 2018 and luckily it all worked out for the better. I can say making that move was one of the best decisions I have made in my career. The difference between the first half of 2018 and the last half was a study in extreme opposites on the career front. Probably the biggest takeaway from that whole situation is that company culture may be the most important thing when it comes to choosing a position.
I decided to upgrade my site to the new version of Ubuntu as I haven’t done that for a couple of years. It is always a nice thing to work on when I am on vacation as it is the sort of thing that I don’t really get around to normally when I am busy. What a pain that ended up being.
The Upgrade for the OS itself went very smoothly as it seems to normally do so for Ubuntu. But the upgrade to the newer version of PHP broke everything with my site. As I think back actually I think this happened last time when I went from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 as well and it jumped from php5 to php7. I ended up with about a 3 hour outage trying to sort everything out.
Of all the regular conference speakers on the Java circuit Venkat is my favorite. He has the ability to break down complex topics and make them very simple to understand. In addition to all of that he also shows you why you should care, and how whatever he is presenting can make your development life better. I always hope that when I am explaining something that I can do it 1/10th as good as he does as then it will probably come across pretty fairly understandable to the person that I am talking to.
I have been messing around with Google Kubernetes Engine for the last few weeks now (as we are deploying my new app to it) and I have to say overall I am impressed. There has been a lot of talk about Kubernetes for a while and at first I was wondering if it was just the next piece of tech being over-hyped like so many things. Having used it now for a month I can say I understand why people are so excited about it. The learning curve is steep, but once you climb it, you will really appreciate the power of the platform.
It has been a crazy few months in startup land. The interesting thing for me about startups is no matter how crazy it is compared to corporate work, I find myself really content amidst the chaos. The big change here is we have decided to build our backend architecture in Go instead of Java. Having done Java for 19 years this is a big change, but for business decisions we decided that the trade offs with Go were better for our long term business needs than the trade offs with Java. Now that I have been using it for a few months I figured I would discuss some of the differences between the languages and what I like and dislike about each.
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.
We have been discussing going to a more serverless architecture at work and so I decided that I should do some research to see where that stuff is now. When I was at Choose we used AWS Lambda to implement the backend of an abandoned shopping cart service. We would then use that data to drive an email campaign to encourage the users to come back and finish purchasing an energy plan. It had a huge effect in driving conversion rates and we were able to implement the service in about 25 lines of vanilla java code. I opted not to use Spring as I judged the startup times to be too slow for it to be worth it. To manage libraries we used the maven shade plugin in our build process to build a fat jar.
I have been watching the Apple Watch for a couple of years now debating about whether I should get one or not. Initially they looked too limited. The battery life on the initial model was very short and then there was the whole lack of being able to get the watch wet, among other limitations. I decided to sit back and wait a few years and see how it evolved.
The Series 2 started looking interesting, but I still didn’t find it compelling enough to give up the freedom of nothing on my wrist. Finally they announced the series 3 last fall and it started to sound like something that might potentially work for me. First it is setup for swimming with. While I don’t swim very often, for me having a watch on in the pool was always a nice way to keep track of the time. Then factor in the ability to track your workout and get texts and take a call without having to get out and dry off, it starts to look really good for someone who is more active than I am.
Java 9 we hardly knew ye, yet here we are and today was the GA release of Java 10. This is especially true for those of us using Spring boot as we just got official Java 9 support a couple of weeks ago and now 10 is out. From my standpoint the big features of the release are the Root Certificates. Java 9 shipped without root certificates if you used OpenJDK which in my mind makes it less useable as now you have to with that, you can’t just run it and go. That is what was keeping me on Oracle’s releases of Java. Now in Java 10 there is no difference with the oracle JDK and the OpenJDK so I will probably just deploy my apps on OpenJDK in the future. That simplifies Linux installation as now you can just run apt-get install and go. Before I used to have to add the ppa for Oracles and install it and then deal with the strong crypto policy files. All those old pain points are gone.