It turns out that keeping a blog reasonably up to date is hard. Yep, I’ve fallen into my own trap.
After most weekdays, I typically want to put my feet up and keep away from the keyboard. However, there is clearly some value in keeping up a writing habit. All skills atrophy without use.
I’m hoping to distil some of my thoughts and experiences in to this blog again this year.
IRL
For the past year-and-a-bit, I’ve been based in Manchester. It’s one of the largest cities in the UK, probably about the same size as Copenhagen, where I spent most of 2012 up to early 2014.
I came here to work for the BBC, the national broadcaster. I joined a department in the process of moving from London to Manchester. That meant my team inherited around 8 software systems (varying quite considerably in size). We spent the first half of 2015 taking over from the previous team and recruiting new people.
Since then we’ve mostly worked on replacing a legacy system (last updated in 2003!). All of this has been a great learning experience; both in terms of day-to-day software development and all the things that go around that (people, communication in a large distributed company, new requirements hitting us from different directions…).
We chose to use the Scala programming language (also used in a few of our inherited projects). That’s been an interesting experience, after my university years involving the odd bit of Haskell, Erlang and lots of Matlab.
I’m hoping to draw out some topics of interest and write about them here, so keep an eye out.