Year in Review, 2016

Changes, Changes, Changes

Published in

theburningmonk.com

4 min readJan 2, 2017

On a personal front, 2016 has been a year of great highs and lows.

I left JUST EAT in March, and started working at Yubl where I had the pleasure of working with an amazing group of people and had lots of fun building things with AWS Lambda and Node.js. We took an ailing architecture that was hard to work with and difficult to release (and required downtime to release to production) and transformed it completely in the space of a few months.

The number of production releases went up by more than ten-fold, features were sometimes completed and released into production in a matter of hours. The product was starting to do well and featured by the App Store several times and ranked as high as 4th in the social category.

Then everything came to a crushing and disappointing end as funding issues and the reality of a startup reared its ugly head.

What followed was several weeks of job hunting, during which I learnt a lot:

London has a vibrant tech scene and there are lots of interesting companies doing amazing things
most companies are still weary of the new serverless paradigm, many are “interested” but few are taking the plunge
DevOps is super hyped up (and in my opinion, completely misunderstood by most)
many companies are buying tickets to the Containerization Train, even though the cheaper, faster and more reliable Serverless Express is right next to it
the money available in the contract market is ridiculous
there’s a wave of relatively new consultancy firms (EqualExperts, Contino, 101Ways, etc.) that are following the footsteps of ThoughtWorks and doing good things in the Enterprise Consultancy space

After much soul searching, I decided to follow my heart and go back to the games industry. As of tomorrow, I’ll be starting at Space Ape Games studio in Holborn and working with a Scala-based stack.

Learning and Sharing

I spoke at 19 conferences and user groups, delivering talks on a diverse range of topics : F#, Serverless, Neo4j, Elm and APL. I have learnt a lot along the way, and visited Dubai and Sydney for the first time and they were both memorable experiences.