23/09/2011

Reboot

I have decided to reboot my blog using Blogger templates. This means the layout is not as well designed as I might like - the previous design had six years of editing and tweaking...! Since the most boring type of blog post is one that talks about the blog itself, I'll leave things at that.

I have recently started working at a new company, a cloud technology start-up based at Edinburgh University. Cloudsoft produce Monterey, a middleware framework for application mobility across various cloud infrastructure providers. I am developing the latest version of this, on which more later. It is a great environment to work in, with really smart colleagues and lots of challenges that keep me thinking. There are also the obvious benefits of being based in the University, such as very fast Internet and free access to academic journals.

Due to the scope of my work, I have found myself learning a lot of interesting new things. These range from picking up new languages (Groovy), libraries and APIs (jclouds, AWS, Seam CDI), applications (Redis, Karaf, Chef, Infinispan) as well as technologies (OSGi, PaaS). I am also working on open source projects during 20% of my time, which will mostly involve Qpid but I have also been investigating jclouds and elasticsearch. I hope to be able to write more about many of these topics.