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

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!

 

New year, new challenges

So, apologies for the lack of updates.  Work in the O2 Lab has been pretty busy in a fun way.  I also been doing a lot in the robotics area (see my youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/burf2000).

So, as for coding I have been working in Java/Android/Lejos when working on my LEGO robots, a lot of this I have opened sourced on GitHub.

As for non robotic stuff, I have been tasked with learning more about Virtual Reality and learning Unity (Best tool for the job), and I have to be honest, now that I have thrown some proper time at Unity, I really like it!  Virtual Reality is enabled by a tick box.

So I don’t have much to show yet but some cool VR stuff will be coming soon 🙂

 

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