Update...

    It's been a while since I added a post to this blog, a long while but I was busy ;)

I joined Tesco in May '17 after doing an amazing Cyber Security training for few months. Tesco shockingly was extremely well organised and modern. I was exposed to challenges I never faced before, like up to 100k requests per second on live system, and big installations of Cassandra and Kafka. My team and I also did a bit of caching for tills so they can work for customers even if there is a short issue with internet connectivity.

Then moved from Tesco to Tantalum Corporation in March '18. Did some fantastic telematics on steroids (convenient services for car owners on top of telematics) there - also learned a lot from two extremely skilled professionals working there - especially how to properly use Spring Cloud, Consul, Vault (thanks Hari and Jim). How to setup modern and robust CICD pipeline so it is helping development instead of being an obstacle and many more useful skills.

After Tantalum I joined Oodle Car Finance. When I joined they were already a fairly established company with a system to do credit searches, scorecard, underwriting and fraud checks. I worked with one of a kind CTO (thanks Alistair) who built quite a lot of this solution himself while he was a CTO hiring lots and lots of people along the way - quite a challenge! So my task was to stabilise the system and do some improvements. After about 3 months I knew enough to figure out the cost of implementing all the features we needed. It was high and the risk of still not having a perfect solution was there as well.

We have decided to build brand new solution, perfectly aligned to the company's aspirations - especially on data science front - and regulatory requirements. I have to admit - building a new solution when you have an old one with lots of problems already solved is much simpler than starting from scratch. Then the usual approach was taken, feasibility study, analysis and design. PoC was done in Feb-Mar '20 while hiring my own team, first lines committed in the beginning of Apr and then getting a fully working solution by July, testing it from functional, performance, saturation, load perspectives and with all green and happy, releasing it to production on 11th of August. This was a wild ride without any serious issues whatsoever!!! Because Data Science team was able to develop and test their models and decision engine without the need to change or deploy any code by Engineering team the pace was immense. They were sometimes testing 20-30 new models in shadow mode to find the best performing one and then they were switching our production models in minutes to benefit from the better model. I worked very closely with Marina, she has tons of experience in financial markets and especially lending, underwriting, risk and pricing - I think we were complementing each other nicely which allowed us to move fast and deliver great value. When Alistair and Marina left to chase bigger and better challenges it was time for me to leave as well...

Since I left I was busy doing some DIY projects around the house and garage.

I finally fixed rusty cable to open bonnet in one of my cars (it was allowing me to open it but then the spring wasn't able to pull the cable back so bonnet wasn't closing), then had to polish headlamps and change tyres (this is the only thing I paid somebody to do ;) tbh). I also finally changed all 8 spark plugs after looking at them on the shelf for about 18 months. I told you I was busy.

I also had to replace fork seals and oil in my motorcycle because it failed MOT. That took about 3-4h but I was very proud of myself to do it with my own hands. And if you are wondering if they are leaking I can report that they are not - everything is perfect. The only thing left to do on a motorcycle is to replace the rear tyre after I did about 20k miles on this one. It is hard to do this when it is cold because the rubber is very stiff and all of the local tyre fitting garages are not touching motorcycle tyres at all - that is the reason why I started to change them myself. I changed 3 motorcycle tyres already and I am still alive so believe me it is not that hard. Before that I had to replace rear wheel bearings as they disintegrated while I was doing 50mph on A2 - not a great experience. While I had the motorcycle in pieces I also finally did valve clearance adjustments for the first time in my life - much simpler than I expected I have to say. The whole process takes about 10min but to get to the valves it takes an hour (one has to remove all the fairings and the fuel tank).

While learning a bit or two about stock markets and trading for my next role I spent some time doing maintenance of my home network. My Raspberry Pi was converted from Retro Pi to Pi Hole with absolutely all devices on my network (and there is quite a lot of them and some put up a decent fight) using my Pi Hole DNS with unbound - validating, recursive and caching DNS server.  This allows me to block almost all advertising and statistics gathering requests coming from my network.

Also built a Spring Boot app for kids to learn spellings for school in more interactive way - they loved when I was implementing it. They were giving me ideas and liked the process of building... when it was done they used it maybe 10 times - max 😆

While going through my archives of photos and videos I noticed a lot of them copied from my camcorder in raw format so repacked them all to h265 codec which shrank them by about 75%.