Things Revisted

First, this bus stop on Market Square, which I blipped many times in my early years here, capturing internal and external reflections. Some of those shots were mesmerising in their surrealism. This one didn't capture anything too bizarre but perhaps it's all the better for that. Just folk waiting for their bus.

Second, it was a day of revisiting our core business application. I have to keep reminding myself that it's still being used by thousands of people in public health, with an interface and technology I designed some 20 years ago. It's showing its age. It's just as well it was so far ahead of the curve at the time, a web application that looked and behaved like a desktop application, before web applications were a thing. These days, everything is written using established and powerful javascript frameworks. I had to write my own from scratch. These days, a whole team of expertise gets involved. I was on my own, working upstairs in my bedroom. I'm talking myself up here, wanting to feel proud of what I achieved, even if our current team are (rightly) cursing me for all the problems they've inherited. It's a monolith and takes a lot of work to maintain and support.

So today I went back to school. My CTO presented the suite of technologies he intends to use to rebuild the whole application from scratch. I want to understand it - at the broadest of levels. The domain has changed so much. It's all containerised and distributed now, and everything is done by messaging. I learned all about Kafka. It's daunting but also exciting, especially as I won't be involved in any design or coding. Right now, that makes me very happy, but nothing like as happy as my team!