New Job : Welcome to Screenmedia

Following my request across my network looking for a new job, I started at Screenmedia 3 weeks ago. For those who don’t know, it’s a digital design practice, which means I’m back to consulting, and I get to work with a lot of smart people, covering technology and design. I’m a Technical Architect in the integrations team, so that’s APIs, voice assistants, serverless, analytics, so should be a good wee adventure. I’ve got a few thoughts on the job hunt which I’m sure will come up at ddd.scot and future blog posts. But if you’re currently looking, we’re hiring. If you’ve got any burning career questions, the DDD Scotland panel survey is still open.

I’ve been working on lots of interesting projects already, so groking multiple domains, sometimes multiple for the same customer, Checking the checklists, and reviewing the onboarding process. Sometimes the best change is the one that lets you re-evaluate what you think you know.

 

 

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Ddd.scot panel sessions and lightening talks

I’ve been selected for 2 sessions at DDD Scotland this year. There’s no presentation from me, but I’ll be chairing a panel, and appearing on another, so plenty of opportunities to answer questions. This is a new thing for ddd.scot, as well as the lightening talks stream to help you practice public speaking, or just share something cool. Please come along and provide your feedback.

If you’re coming, please submit a question to the Your Career in Software Development panel so we can answer the questions you have on your career. Submit your question anonymously here

Hope to see you there.

Cloud thinking : storage as data structures

We’ve all experienced the performance implications of saving files. We use buffers, and we use them asynchronously.

Azure storage has Blobs. They look like files, and they fail like files if you write a line at a time rather than buffering. But they’re not files, they’re data structures, and you need to understand them as you need to understand O(N) when looking at Arrays and Linked Lists. Are you optimising for inserts, appends or reads, or cost?

I know it’s tempting to ignore the performance and just blame “the network” but you own your dependencies and you can do better. Understand your tools, and embrace data structures as persistent storage. After all, in the new serverless world, that’s all you’ve got.

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Understanding Block Blobs, Append Blobs, and Page Blobs | Microsoft Docs

 

My 2017 in review

After the whirlwind of 2016, 2017 looked like a quieter year. Fewer talks, some interesting and rewarding challenges bringing a new product to market, and a chance to build and reflect on what it means to be a technical leader, to move jobs, and to be productively lazy. Although I notice there’s still a lot of interest in obscure bugs thanks to Chrome’s URL limit, and the User Experience when 2 factor authentication needs to be reset.

I’ve not had quite as many blog views as last year, but I’ve accepted I’m not here to be a blogging superstar. This is my scratchpad for the talks I want to give, and a place to share useful reminders and signposts for future me, and others. Thanks to all of you who have helped shape and refine these thoughts here, on twitter and via other channels.

I wasn’t planning a new job in 2017, but more on that next week (and many, many thanks to my twitter and LinkedIn connections on that front – I’ve been humbled), which means I have some more thoughts on the product life vs the consultancy life that I hope to share this year.

I got a few opportunities to think about applying Conway’s Law to build teams that make the right software, most notably in the Architecting Teams guided conversation I led for CodeCraft.

Looking to 2018

I’d love to keep up 2 blogs a week, playing with styles and topics, as I’ve started to do last year. I’ve got enough topics on my Trello board for a few years at that pace (including one describing the Trello board). I’ve got a new adventure, and some experiments in productivity that I’ll hopefully get more time to explore, as well as reflecting on design and the next generation.

I don’t do New Year resolutions. It’s always a bad day to start something. Always reflect, always refine. And if you leave it to New Year, you’re only giving yourself 70-odd chances to change. Why limit yourself?

Sláinte