So, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, I've been working for Booking.com for close to a full year now and I have thoroughly enjoyed my employment there. It really is the most challenging and exciting environment that I have been a part of and I remain highly motivated. There are so many things that keep the job interesting so I'll go into a few in detail:
So, after writing the previous three posts, life went a bit hectic and writing blog posts kinda fell of the radar. So, what have I been up to since the last post? Well, I quit my job at TomTom, started a job at Booking.com where I started as a UNIX System Administrator but changed function to Python developer working on tools for both System Administrators and Developers which I have been enjoying quite a bit.
Booking.com is an awesome company to work for, it's a huge company but you don't notice that while you're actually working there. There is little actual bureaucracy getting in the way of getting things done and work has a way to find the people who are most willing to do it, which is how I ended up doing Python development while being hired to do sysadmin stuff. I got asked how good my Python was, to which I responded that it was pretty decent, and if I wanted to work on internal tooling, to which I responded that I wouldn't mind doing that at all.
When I started at my current job, I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of applications we had running and how these were all related in one way or another, application A depended on information from application B which in turn needed application C to make sure that application D wasn't sending the wrong information to application E and so on. Of course, this made for a very hard to debug stack as an error in application A could be caused by a fault in application B, C, D, E, any of their dependencies or even a combination of all of these.
As you can imagine, all these applications generated an enormous amount of log data that was spread all over the place. Debugging any problem became just as much a scavenger hunt as it was problem solving as you had to find all the relevant logs, find the time of the problem and correlate all that data manually. This was a tedious mission to embark on and made any root cause analysis very time consuming and one was less motivated to embark on said mission.
One of the reasons that it took me so long to set up my own blog was that I could never find a blogging engine that fit my requirements so I always said I would just write my own... Well, writing my own never really happened as I always have more important/fun projects on my plate so yesterday I took the time to evaluate blogging engines and chose one to host this blog. The requirements I had were as follows:
So, after being online for longer than most people can remember and participating in many communities, I've finally set up a blog... Yes, yes, I know, way to keep up with the times ain but I've never really bothered until now.
Why now, you ask? Well, I think it's mostly because I've been building new stuff lately and every so often I just want to vent a bit about things I think work well, things that work less well or things that generally horrify me. I will also be sharing information about current projects and relevant tech tricks on here.
I'm Daniël Franke, a Python developer/System engineer hybrid working at Booking.com. I've been coding and administrating servers for most of my life and this is the corner of the internet where I can just rant and/or rave about anything I want without anyone stopping me. This blog will be mostly tech centred but it can go off-topic sometimes.