About

This is a blog written by me, Daniel Bryant, and the content documents my thoughts and experiences as I spend my day working as a software development consultant, designing and deploying software applications to the cloud for Small-to-Medium Enterprises.

I specialise in working with the JVM stack (sprinkled with a little Python), and am currently enjoying the rise of ‘polyglot persistence’ which allows me to experiment with cool technologies like Redis, MongoDB and HBase. I believe there is still very much a place for RDBMS is the business world (despite what the NoSQL fanboys might say), and am a certified MySQL DBA. I also finds that indexing/searching is currently very popular in contract roles, and have used both ElasticSearch and Solr extensively in the e-commerce domains.

I am currently exploring working within the DevOps domain, and am becoming more and more comfortable with provisioning tools (Chef, Puppet, SaltStack etc) which are finally allowing me to realise my long term goals of Continuous Delivery. I’m currently deploying a lot of applications to the Cloud (specifically on the Amazon Web Service platform), and am I am seeing some great benefits (and challenges) with working within this environment.

Many astute readers will have guessed by now that I take pride in being a ‘Jack of all trades’. I frequently perform multiple roles over the lifespan of client projects, including architect, developer, sysadmin/DevOps and DBA, and I often find myself switching between a whiteboard, Linux shell, IDE, and Javascript debugger throughout the day. I constantly seek new knowledge and embrace the ‘polyglot’ approach by developing solutions using the most appropriate languages and datastore technologies. I am also a strong proponent of TDD and aspire to Robert Martin’s concept of ‘Clean Code’.

I enjoy participating as a mentor within the software development community, and am an active member in both the London Java Community (LJC) and London Mongo User Group. I am also an advocate of open source software and have contributed to many projects, primarily with the goal to give something back to the community, but also to learn about exciting new technologies. Currently I am a committer on the Adopt OpenJDK ‘Betterrev’ project (lead by the LJC), which strives to facilitate community engagement and contributions to the Reference Implementation of Java.