Search Engine

New Burf.co, Business Success Diploma and building furniture!

Posted on by burf2000

So, I am trying my best to make sure I update my blog regularly so that I can look back and see what I have achieved.

Burf.co, now with no search button

So between spending over 12 hours building furniture for the wife (2 new bunk beds, 2 desks, 2 chairs and a bookcase) I also managed to build a new MVP of Burf.co.  The previous version was using Swift and was all in one (frontend/ backend).  The new one is properly structured and uses VueJS for the frontend hosted externally, and the backend is in Java Spring Boot.  It is just a prototype at the moment and doesn’t even have a search button, you just type and it starts getting the results (and smashing the db) but it was a fun prototype to build and is definitely the way I want to go.

Next Steps

  • Increase dataset from 10 million to 100 million and make it fast as f*ck
  • Add site pages (contact, about, submit etc)
  • Add tag cloud and routing to make it better for SEO

Business Success Diploma

So ages ago I signed up to Shaw Academy as it has some great courses and reviews.  I got a lifetime membership so I wasn’t in a rush.  Since I finished the bodybuilding show, I have been caining through the course at super speed and hope to take my exam this week:). It was one of my new year’s resolutions to do (so was Hack24 🙁 ).  I am learning a lot and hope to carry on with more advanced training around business.

Echo

The above projects are the fluff as I call it to get out of the way so that I can focus on Echo and getting this startup off the ground.  I already started building a basic website for them.  Once that’s complete, its time to focus on the MVP

Robotics

When it rains, it pours!  So before I had even thought about the above 3 projects, I had decided I was going to build a humanoid out of VEX EDR, which is a brilliant building platform.  They had just brought out their new V5 system which looks epic (more powerful motors, more motors, vision control, touch screen etc).  VEX was very nice in sending me some V5 hardware to start building this 3D Printed / VEX EDR humanoid!  This will be my chilled weekend project 🙂

 

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!