Two Months at BlueLibris
Back for a Quick WriteWell, I've been at BlueLibris for two months and a day, now... and each one of those days I've wanted to blog about something that's happened. On occasion, I've G+'ed about something, but in general I've just been too busy to take a breath, much less use that breath to write some informal prose.
I've taken a few photos during this time, and put them up on flickr in this set; smaller versions are peppered throughout this post :-)
The First Day
Half Moon Bay, about 30 minutes from work. |
After I left Canonical, I headed out from Colorado and took a few weeks off to go on a meditation retreat up in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon. This area was deeply reminiscent of the Colorado mountains, of which I am so fond. Such environs are my natural habitat... so imagine my shock when I was hurled 50 years into the future, deposited in something like a night scene from Bladerunner. 'Cause that's exactly how it felt :-) Not bad... just very, very different. Even though I'd been to the Valley a bunch of times in the past 10 years or so, it never really hit home... until it was my home.
Note the executive dress: shorts and flip-flops. |
I had arrived early at 9:00am, so the place was locked up tight. I took that opportunity to meet some of the neighbors, walk around a bit, and then read up on the interesting facilities we were renting for our offices.
The text describes the facility's power. |
Eventually, Soroush showed up, I introduced myself, and we made our way inside. The interior was even cooler than the exterior :-) There's a large open space where most people sit, a dark cave for the software engineers, an unused loft upstairs that looks down over the open space, and a cute little kitchen area adjacent to (and part of) the loft.
The Intervening Weeks
Within a day or two, I'd purchased some bean bags, nerf guns, nerf balls, action figures, and die cast cars. It was starting to feel like a start-up :-) (And the nerf gun fights reamain a regular brain-break for many of us!). A few days after that, Tim Hyland bought some sling-shot monkeys... I think we use these even more than the nerf products!
Playtime aside, the work has been very grueling. We all work late hours (but have a good time hanging out while we do so), wear many hats, and have more responsibilities than we care to enumerate. Equally, however, we're all deeply invested in the company, believe in the services we're providing to the health and other industries, and most of all are committed to the success of the company.
On that note, most of us were involved in ventures during the dot boom/bomb, and accrued wisdom from that area on how to conduct ourselves responsibly, even in the midst of all the excitement our innovations are generating.
I look forward to the time (soon!) when I'll be able to post more about these :-) For now, though, I can be very general and give a brief overview of our tech.
Our Technology
Matt playing along with a thumbs-up :-) |
As events are generated on the device, they get pushed up to "the cloud" where additional processing and heuristics are performed. We're working with lots of maths, machine learning, custom algorithms, etc., all in a distributed computing environment. We're using nosql solutions for long-term storage, and a Python-based framework for web management tools. We're in the process of converting the original application into a JavaScript-driven suite of applications. We're also giving the Python an overhaul in anticipation of significantly increased load and general usage over the next year (we've got some exciting partnerships and customers -- both existing and forth-coming). Henry Messenger and myself are working on these bits right now. To get the device talking to the cloud and collecting all the right data, we have the talented Kent Ryhorchuk hacking like a madman and consuming the APIs we're providing him.
There are other software development efforts in the works that I can't really talk about... but given the space, I'm sure you can imagine the possibilities :-)
Future Posts
I've run out of time for now, but I do want to mention that with BlueLibris, there is a tantalizing connection to where I see technology going in the next 10-20 years (ultra large-scale systems), and I'd like to say more about that soon. Furthermore, we should have some nice news-worthy items that will get their own press releases, but I'll be making community-friendly updates here on that as well. I'm also taking steps to make sure that we contribute back to the open source community, and will have posts relating to those efforts as well.
So watch this space, and look for more developments soon... :-)
Syndicated 2011-10-04 18:41:00 (Updated 2011-10-04 19:58:53) from Duncan McGreggor