The week flew by as I had many interesting, in-person interactions this week. I have spent three whole days in our London office. But that also meant I had some time on the trains to read.
Contents:
Trying different ways of data engineering
The week’s culmination was a three-hour meeting on Friday with all Data Engineers in my profession. In August last year, we started experimenting with our ways of working, and it was time we had a retrospective. Over half a year, I have asked them to work in different ways, drawing a lot from software engineering practices, focusing on collaboration, and sharing the burden and knowledge remotely.
I won’t go into detail here just now. I think it deserves an article of its own, and perhaps to be published somewhere else. Let’s just say, that the results are better than I expected. Working in pairs (not necessarily pairing), dedicated coaching sessions on non-work related mini projects were a success. There are some things to improve, but the ideas are working, and we are improving our mostly remote collaboration.
The #12in23 challenge
I have been working on my own skills too. At the beginning of the week, I have learnt about the 12in23 challenge organised by exercism.org. It’s about learning a little bit about 12 programming languages in 2023. Obviously, I joined in. I started with COBOL, C, C++ and C#. I have done some C programming, and I’m reasonably proficient in C#, but I haven’t done anything in C++ for some 20 years, and I have never programmed in COBOL.
Why these four? It happens that these languages have been created more or less 15 years apart. Trying to do simple exercises in all four over the week gave me a new perspective on how technology and programming developed over the last 65 years.
I do recommend it. It’s good fun 🙂
Is 2023 the year of cloud repatriation?
There appears to be more and more talk online about cloud repatriation. Last week I read quite a few recent articles about it. It looks like many organisations rapidly moved to the cloud during the pandemic. Many must have used the “lift and shift” approach and stopped there. Now, they struggle with the raising costs. According to one of those articles, 93% of companies repatriating (moving back out of the public cloud) are quoting the cost as the main factor.
I think many of the moves were not thought through, or followed through, and this is just normal correction. I wonder what the year will bring in this regard.
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