Another “Year in Review” post, again mostly focused on professional life & tech stuff (since it’s a tech blog 😉). Check 2016 here.
Mobify -> Demonware (Activision)
So, I’ve left Mobify and joined Demonware (which is a subsidiary of Activision or Activision Blizzard, Inc. to be more precise).
Mobify is a great company that builds great products. I really enjoyed my work there, but I felt like the company’s direction hasn’t always matched with my skills very well.
Demonware is probably one of a few companies in Vancouver that deal with really large-scale systems. I’ve been tackling very challenging projects so far, I wrote about it here, so I’m not going to repeat myself.
Interviews
I’ve applied to 5+ companies before joining Demonware and I discovered that companies with great interview process and amazing recruiters are EVEN MORE RARE than companies doing DevOps right 😱
I don’t want to mention any names, but every single company where I applied is very well known around the world.
Still, one recruiter completely disappeared and stopped answering me after rescheduling the initial interview a few times.
Another recruiter couldn’t reply to me in 8 DAYS (!!!) on the last stage (!) of the interview process (with a few emails from me during those 8 days), only returning to say that the head of engineering (who was supposed to do the final interview) is on vacation and we need to reschedule. You can say that 8 days is probably not horrible, but how are you going to get engineers if you’re not Amazon/Google/Facebook in this case? It’s very likely the engineer you’d want to hire already has a few offers, and she is not going to wait for many weeks.
Blog
One of my resolutions was to write more in this blog. And I miserably failed 😞 In my defence I want to say that I was very successful at public speaking opportunities (also new job meant more time researching & reading).
I’m pretty happy with the blog setup I implemented last year, now I can publish with a single ./deploy.sh command (which distributes content over AWS CloudFront CDN within seconds).
Some annual stats about the blog:
- Pageviews: 15220
- Average session duration: 42 seconds
- Top 5 countries: USA, Canada, India, Germany, UK
- New / Returning visitor ratio: 71 / 29
Conferences / Talks / Workshops
A lot of events visited in 2017 (I highlighted all where I presented):
- Microxchg Conference (Berlin)
- Craft Conf (Budapest)
- Scala Up North (Vancouver)
- AWS User Group (Vancouver) x4
- Full Stack Conference (Toronto)
- Polyglot Unconference (Vancouver)
- Kubernetes Meetup (Vancouver)
- Erlang & Elixir Meetup (Vancouver)
- ConFoo Conference (Vancouver)
Things I Learned
- The borderline between server & client JavaScript is becoming thinner
- Big Data tools is probably the biggest Scala driver
- Java 8 is (surprisingly) a pretty usable and solid language
- Anyone can learn bash scripting (even me)
- Kubernetes Kubernetes Kubernetes
- Knowing more about the Linux internals does make you a better software engineer
- Properly designed microservices is not a sacred knowledge anymore
- DevOps is still really hard. If you have a “DevOps team”, then you’re doing it wrong
- Like: Kafka, Spark, Flink, Kubernetes, Redis, HTTP2
- Dislike: Hadoop ecosystem