Year in Review 2015

View original Gist on GitHub

Year in Review 2015.md

Looking back at what I achieved this year…

• First and foremost: I had the pleasure of working with an incredibly talented team (@Frost_J, @dblooman, @charlierevett, @dan_arnould, @alxnorton)
• Published the book “Programming in Clojure” and obviously from that process I’ve enjoyed furthering my exposure and competency within the language
• Published a popular article about “Desigining for Simplicity” for Mozilla star and all-round great dev David Walsh
• My entire team @BBCNews smashed it’s way through the General Elections and getting the Newsbeat product out onto the AWS platform (the first fully AWS product from BBC News)
• Co-author/architect for an internal BBC service (along with REST API and supporting CLI tools) that will become the front door to/and future platform for the News product. Built to be scalable, distributed and highly concurrent using Go and Ruby (along with Redis, Circuit Breakers, many different AWS services and all that good stuff)
• My team @BBCNews (Frameworks) won the “Connecting the News” category at the BBC Hack Day
• Lots of line management duties and working hard to ensure I get my colleagues promoted into senior roles (hard work with satisfying results)
• Released an open-source program, written in Go, called (ingeniously…) Go-Requester. This was a HTTP service that accepted a collection of “components”, fans-out requests and returns aggregated content to support a component based platform architecture
• I represented the BBC at the AWS re:Invent 2015 week-long technical conference in Las Vegas. Thanks to @dblooman and @stevenjack85 for making it not only educational, but a great laugh as well
• Published a guest article (”Building Software with Make”) for the popular online resource Smashing Magazine
• Released another Go based open-source program aimed at being a long running binary for Mac OS X that scraps a specific sports website looking for an upcoming event, then triggers a native OS notification