Personal

It has been almost six years since my last post here. Six years! When I wrote about joining Facebook back in 2020, I had no idea it would be this long before I’d write again. Life got busy, priorities shifted, and the blog quietly went to sleep. Well, it’s waking up now. What happened since 2020 A lot has changed. Facebook became Meta, and I moved from software engineering into engineering management. I currently run a team in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), where we build the data infrastructure behind Meta’s generative AI efforts - web crawlers, synthetic data pipelines, and infrastructure for AI agents. ...

It has been a while since I last time wrote a post here, hence I wanted to update you on what is happening with the website (why the lack of activity) and what’s new in my life. And there is plenty! Joining Facebook When I wrote my last blog post here (October 2019) I was in a full-on Facebook interview preparation mode. I really enjoyed my time at Scott Logic, but Facebook has been my long time dream and I decided to try to get in one more time. ...

I have been posting a little bit less recently. In some ways, it is easier to write two blog posts a week than one blog post once in a while. I have recently read the book titled “Atomic Habit” that motivated me to fix this state of affairs! As you might know, I have written over 100 blog posts in 2018 as a sort of personal challenge. It was not easy, but it was immensely satisfying! You can check out my summary post about this. ...

The first language I used to write a small program was Pascal. Since then I have worked professionally with Java, JavaScript, Groovy and a few more. Currently, I am learning a bit of Go in my spare time. In this blog post, I want to encourage you to learn a new language as well and provide you with a few ideas. The more you know the easier it gets First of all, I have noticed that the more languages you already know, the easier it is to learn new ones. I guess like with everything, you start seeing familiar patterns and solutions and in general- things start to make sense much quicker. ...

I am quite excited to share with you “The Journey to DevOps” (announcement and the download link here), the first white paper that I have published with my company Scott Logic. This white paper will help you: Understand the DevOps mindset Learn more about challenges facing public sector organisations when adopting DevOps Help you assess your DevOps maturity Present actionable advice on embarking on your DevOps journey Appreciate the value that comes from embracing DevOps If you are interested in reading more, download our white paper from Scott Logic blog: “The Journey to DevOps” – in PDF format.

Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope you missed these blog posts at least a little bit. I had a good rest during the festive period and feel ready to start writing and hacking again. In this article, I want to tell you about my most recent fascination- programming for Alexa (Echo) enabled devices. What is Alexa You probably know all about Alexa, but let’s make sure that we are all on the same page. Alexa is a virtual assistant developed by Amazon that can leave in different devices. Most popular of those are probably the Echo series developed by Amazon. Here is my Echo Spot: ...

I wanted to write 2 blog posts a week in 2018, which would result in at least 100 blog posts in a year… This is the number 100! I could not be happier! In this centenary blog post, I look back at the journey that took me here. I will also share with you some of the ideas for this blog in 2019. Beginning of the blog I have started this blog in January with a short, a bit vague explanation of why. After publishing that first blog post, I quickly came up with an idea of writing at least twice a week- I had plenty to say! ...

I have blogged about my road to productivity recently. I received a comment there from one of my readers asking me if I have a secret weapon that helped me be so productive. While I don’t have a secret weapon strictly for productivity, I realised that I have a secret weapon (or two) for learning. That weapon is simply… Audiobooks! Why Audiobooks? Why would you get an audiobook? What is so magical about them, when you can simply read a book (a paper version) or an eBook (on your Kindle or something similar? ...

Being productive and motivated- who wouldn’t want that? I used to think that some people are just bornmore motivated, that some people simply are this way. “The War of Art” is an eye-opening book. I think that if I have never read it- it is unlikely that I would manage to write two articles a week for this blog ever since starting in January 2018. Here is a short story on my road to productivity. ...

I love playing chess. I also love programming. How to marry the two? How about playing chess against a chess engine (chess playing program) that I have designed and wrote? If you are intrigued- read on! This is the first blog post in the series about building my chess engine in Java. The rules of chess I assume that you are more-less familiar with the rules of chess. You have two “armies” facing each other, making a move after a move, until one side is guaranteed to capture the enemy king (the checkmate), or neither side can win- a draw. ...