It has been ten months since I started this blog. I had high hopes for it and wanted to share all the great info about all the awesome technologies I was working with, but it all ended up being much more time-intensive than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I still find myself wanting to share my knowledge with the rest of the community, so here we go for attempt number two.
Read further if you are interested in what I was up to this year.
Job change
Even though working for Sklik was a fun and enlightening experience, I realized that to increase my pace in moving forward, learning more and pushing myself harder, I would need a change, and a big one at that. I finally chose Rocket Fuel Inc., an international real-time bidding oriented company. Compared to Seznam.cz, which is operating only in Czech Republic, this company was working with data on a whole new level. They had multiple data centers over America, Europe and Asia, processing tens of billions of events per day. Fortunately, they were just establishing offices in Prague and I was accepted to be an integral part of the emerging local Data Infrastructure team. Soon, I was designing and implementing entire projects, consulting and helping other teams and sharing my knowledge at internal tech talks.
Acquisition
A few months after joining Rocket Fuel the company got acquired by Sizmek, another advertising company, focusing on creative tools and ad serving for advertising agencies. Even though I was concerned at first, as I was never in a company that went through such a process before, I learned that this is actually a normal occurence for Silicon Valley companies. On top of that, the two companies’ offerings were not even in competition, they complemented each other. For us at engineering this meant more data to process, more project possibilities and more opportunities for the future.
Trip to San Francisco
One such opportunity was joining the Serving Infrastructure team on an extended trip to the San Francisco Bay area where we worked together, at the Redwood offices, on the design of a new rapid lookup solution for the companies’ 10+ billion user profiles. I was able to attend the Scylla Summit conference in San Francisco where I learned a great deal about the impressive ScyllaDB distributed storage system. I was also able to finally meet the great guys of our Redwood Data Infrastructure team and engage in some further knowledge sharing. It was overall a great experience.
Further plans
Despite all of that being behind me, I feel I still have a lot more to work on, learn and experience in the near future. But I also realized that in order for that to be worth something, I have to put an effort to share it publicly. Companies get acquired, shut down, brought up and projects get scrapped and replaced, but what is let loose on the internet tends to stay there (which is both awesome and scary). That is why, as of now, I intend to renew my efforts to write articles, contribute to open source projects and, hopefully, even finally speak at conferences.
See you later!