I have been absent from my blog for a while, nearly 3 years to be precise, which coincides with starting my current job at an energy start-Up. There has been a lot of interesting work going on, during which we have won numerous awards, but last December, we secured round A funding of £6 million. Having achieved that goal it is time to take stock of a few things and make a few changes.

Like many things in life, the time I spent blogging and working on open source projects was both a joy and a burden, as were the various emails I would inevitably get as a result of participating in the public sphere. While I’ve not had much time for those things with work, moving house, family, people with broken arms and legs, running a cub scout pack and the myriad of other things that go on in life, I am going to try and get back to enjoying some of those things as I used to.

There are also a couple of small project ideas that I’m interested in exploring and am thinking about revisiting an old project that is still getting a lot of interest. DataFactory was a project I wrote to generate quality random test data and I just threw out there on GitHub as I was prone to do at the time. That was years ago and it still gets a steady stream of stars and attention on GitHub which is fantastic despite my neglect.

I will be writing some new blog posts, probably not so much about Hibernate/JPA, Spring and Java EE (or whatever it is going to end up being called) as I have in the past. I’ve been working with Spring REST microservices in AWS and a lot of concurrency from which I’ve learned a lot. As I’ve been mentoring other developers I found some ideas and principles that come with experience that might be worth sharing in a post or two for the benefit of others.

I’m hoping to start slowly with a couple of smaller posts to start building those blogging muscles back up.

Be seeing you soon.