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.
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.
As we are at the end of the Easter Octive I realized that I have been remiss to give an update on how the intermittent fasting went for Lent. From Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday I only ate between the hours of 6pm and 10pm.
Overall I found that after a day or 2 your body adapts and you don’t really get hungry during the day. The exception to this was Saturdays. Since Catholic’s can’t eat meat on Friday’s during lent the food that I consumed did not keep me as full. Additionally I have more time on Saturdays and I think there is a natural habit to munch sometimes when bored or just hanging around the house.
Lent is here and I decided to go with the intermittent fasting that I had been considering. First as previously mentioned, I was doing the slow carb diet. Between January 9th and March 1st I went from 251 pounds to 228.8 pounds. And that wasn’t adhering too closely to the diet. For example the diet has you eating smaller meals every three hours and that is something I struggle with. It doesn’t really work for me. So I was just eating 2-4 meals a day depending on the day. At the beginning close to 4 and by the end just 2. Also in that time frame, we celebrated my wife’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and my daughter’s birthday all of which involved breaking the diet to some degree. I think if I had stuck close to the diet I could have lost that weight in 6 weeks based on the rate that I was losing early on before family obligations came into play. But at the end of the day if you can’t cheat here and there to celebrate the important things in life, that is no way to live. And Slow Carb is definitely a system that if you stick to it most of the time will work for you even with the built in cheats.
I came across another article on hackernews about the benefits of fasting. It seems that as more and more time goes by the evidence grows that intermittent fasting has enormous health benefits. This story is even more amazing from the diabetic standpoint and the regenerating your pancreas.
Then my coworker sent me this video which I also think is good food for thought:
This got me thinking that maybe I should try the one meal a day thing throughout lent this year and see how that goes. I was already considering closing it out with another 72 hour fast. Though this year I am not going to fast from coffee I found that I was too mentally foggy in the afternoons without it. So given that I like to experiment anyway spending a bit over a month just having maybe supper every day and coffee (black) in the morning I think will be a good test to see how this actually would work lifestyle wise. I haven’t decided for sure whether I will go with that or not (I don’t have to decide until Wednesday morning), but that is the direction that I am leaning right now.
Well that was fast. I didn’t expect the day after the post to have an update but here it is. One thing I love about open source it is possible to find answers quickly. So it turns out that this is not in fact a bug. Apparently Jackson 2 aims for a Java 6 compatibility level. As a result of this they can’t include Java 8 features in the baseline as that would break compatibility. So they have a module to use the Java 8 features that you can bring into Maven with the following settings:
I have been using Jackson for JSON processing for many years now. It is a great framework and mostly just works. It is the default framework in Spring Boot and mostly it just sits behind the scenes and drives most micro services in Java these days. That is why I was surprised when we hit a bug in the framework as I hadn’t really had any issues in the past.
I came across this post on linked in and it was too good to not share. The author highlights all the benefits of starting a blog. The key thing he mentions is that you accrue all these benefits even if no one reads your blog. I have found all of this to be true in my personal life. I have very few readers of this blog, but in the end I write this blog for me and not for someone else.