Year in Review 2014

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Year in Review 2014.md

Looking back at what I achieved this year…

I published two books with Apress:
- Pro Vim
- tmux Taster
Worked on BBC News Elections and Scottish Referendum back-end architecture and development with JRuby and AWS
Organised public event with Sandi Metz at BBC New Broadcasting House
- Specifically getting a special thanks from Sandi in her opening story about her parents response to our invitation to speak at the BBC
Co-designed and built cloud based distributed load test tool with David Blooman
Co-designed and built a CI workflow around static asset compilation with Steven Jack and Daniel Arnould
Hacking on Steven Jack’s excellent cloud tooling gem (built specifically for BBC)
Having fun understanding the problem space of both concurrency and distributed systems design and implementation
Became technical lead/principal engineer for the BBC News Frameworks team
- But in reality that means nothing without an unbelievably solid team of extremely talented engineers to help make things happen:
Co-designed and built Market Data back-end utilising the Alephant Framework
Worked on updating the Alephant Framework example applications
- Alephant was originally conceived by the massively talented Robert Kenny
Working in an environment that (albeit slowly and not entirely perfected - e.g. no automated rollbacks) has reached a state of Continuous Delivery.
Had fun playing with Steven Jack’s great Spurious project
- Spurious is a toolset allowing development against a subset of AWS resources locally
Co-designed a new version of BBC Newsbeat that is cloud based, distributed and utilising the Alephant Framework
Won some awards:
- Best Public Relations of the Year (for my books Pro Vim and tmux Taster)
- Most innovative use of Technology
  - I accepted this award for the BBC News Frameworks team, but in reality it is shared between both Steven Jack and David Blooman for their great contributions to tooling built around Docker
Currently building a Trello to JIRA (and vice-versa) AWS based application to help synchronise data between these two platforms
- This is likely to be abstracted/generalised into an open-source project at some point in the future (as other organisations may find this type of tool useful)
Very happy to be working within a team that challenges itself to investigate and re-evaluate its stance on specific programming techniques and principles. This is a very encouraging and motivational team and I’m proud to be a part of it.