Burf

A busy week : CTO, 70 million and a Java backend!

Posted on by burf2000

As I do my final prep for my bodybuilding show tomorrow, I thought I would do a quick post of what’s happened over the week.  I had planned to do very little due to the show however people who know me, know I don’t like to stay still for long!

CTO

So, a while back I got invited to become the part-time CTO of a small startup called Echo MG (Music Global) who have big plans to change how entertainment is booked, artists etc.  The role would include everything from designing their infrastructure to help pitch their MVP to investors.  It all sounded very exciting, however, I had to turn it down at the time due to changing my main job (from O2 to Reach).  Now I have settled in and got approval, I have gone for the role.  I hope to post more about this as it develops but it should be a good learning experience.

70 Million

So, I kicked Burf.co off again on Friday and its been going like the clappers! (and not even using the blade server).  It’s currently sitting at 70 million pages and once it gets to 100, I plan to stop it and start the NLP parsing which should be super interesting.

Java Sprint Boot(kotlin)

So I have had to think long and hard what to write my search engine, AI/ML platform and robotics stuff in.  The obvious choice is Python but I just don’t like the syntax (space, no brackets etc).  So after looking around and seeing what would also help me for work, I decided to learn Spring Boot using Kotlin.  Kotlin is a great language, it’s very like Swift which is brilliant.  I can use it with Android so helps work and there is not much you can’t do with Java.  Spring Boot seems to be like black magic, you go to their site, tell them the frameworks, build tools etc and press a button and it makes a project for you 🙂

Chromebook

So I brought a Chromebook, it’s actually the 2nd one I have owned maybe 3rd but that was before they could run Android apps which is sweet!  Why? you ask!  Well, I wanted a cheap, light laptop with good battery life and no noise (e.g I cant dev on it) to focus me to actually plan and write stuff down.  So by being fairly limiting, and running off the Google ecosystem, it should make me more productive!

 

This weeks update : Bye Bye MongoDB

Posted on by burf2000

So it is exciting times! I have made some progress with TRTLExchange, however, due to things outside of my control it been slower than expected.  So I have turned my spare time to Burf.co, my new search engine project and while there is no website for it yet (will be by the weekend), the actual search technology(code) has come along leaps and bounds.  Overnight it managed to index over 500,000 pages which for a single server, was pretty cool.  It did get up to 1.3 million pages but MongoDB has erm, shit the bed(many many times).  This could be a hardware limit (Harddrive speed) or some performance thing I need to do however it gets to the point where I can’t even insert more records without timeouts.  This concerns me quite a bit as I have a HP Blade Server on way to somewhat up the crawling rate by a factor of 8.  I am going to try and give it one last go today however its taken 12 hours to delete the data from the DB (I did remove instead of drop 🙁 ).  It has been a very interesting learning curve on learning MongoDB.  I think unless some magic happens I am going to try out Postgres next.

On the Swift front I did start building the frontend for Burf, first I was going to do this in VueJS, however, I have now found that Swift’s server-side framework Perfect supports templating via Mustache.  I think I will make faster progress writing it all in Swift than switching back and forth.   I still want to continue learning VueJS on the side (used for the TRTLExchange) as Javascript is such a good thing to know nowadays.

Writing this blog post has also just raised the point that I was trying to learn Kotlin about a month ago (facepalm).  Damn!