Thursday, November 26, 2020

New adventures

 After more than 30 years of hard work at Ericsson, MySQL, Sun and Oracle I found

the time to start some new adventures in my life.


I have spent most of that time developing NDB Cluster and the MySQL Server.

Most of this time have been spent on developing new features improving

functionality and performance of these products.


The NDB Cluster product has been developed to a stage where it can be used for

a multitude of applications. Already now NDB Cluster is used for such diverse

things as DNS servers, DHCP servers, AAA servers, LDAP servers, SQL servers,

financial trading, gaming servers and even file servers.


Since I have become a bit older now, I wanted to ensure that I only focus on

the projects that I feel inspired by whether it is work related or not.

I feel much more inspired to assist people in using NDB Cluster. I have always

found it inspiring to work with companies using the product. So what could be

more natural than to join a company, Logical Clocks AB that has built their

future on top of NDB Cluster. Link to announcement


Logical Clocks AB already uses NDB Cluster to build a highly scalable file

system based on the Hadoop file system, HDFS, with very low latency. They have

proceeded to develop an on-line Feature Store that can be used by companies

in their Data Science projects. The feature store can also be integrated in

on-line systems to analyse e.g. financial transactions as they happen.


I will also be available for short projects assisting other companies to work

with NDB Cluster through my consulting company, iClaustron AB.


Going to work last monday was interesting, mostly I have known very well what

to do when I start working in the morning. This day I went to work with no

idea what would happen. This was exciting and I already started learning lots

of things about machine learning, Go programming, Python programming,

PCI Express networking, Prometheus, Grafana and a lot of other things found

on GitHub.


Even though my new assignment is about using NDB rather than developing I have

also found some time to do some things to improve NDB Cluster around

monitoring. More on that later.


I also hope to find time to pursue some personal interests. I am very interested

in genealogy, currently this means I am transcribing court records from the

1680s in the county of LuleƄ in the north of Sweden.


I also have some ideas about how to develop global genealogical databases that

I might play around with.


So life in Corona pandemic times can be socially tough, but I still find lots of

time to develop myself in new ways and with the new job at Logical Clocks AB I

have had many chances to meet and interact with many new people. It's also nice

to be tutored and not only to tutor. The world of machine learning is a world

that I first learnt about in 1986, at that time the world wasn't ready for

AI, but now there are many interesting challenges that can be handled with the

immensely more effective computing at hand now.


I feel really inspired to dive into all these interesting things while still

continuing my focus on making NDB Cluster a product that can be used to handle

the most challenging problems mankind encounters.