I thought I would start my blog with a post about why I am writing it. At the very least it will help collect my thoughts together about how I plan and write posts. Not that I expect that anyone will read it. You see I am not an expert, and I don't plan to write about stuff I know well. This blog is going to be a place for me to put my thoughts, my ideas and my plans. Many many things I put here will be wrong! Even worse, I am a terrible communicator, terrible at writing and my spelling and grammar sucks more than you know. But, I am an idea machine. Ideas, good bad and ugly bounce around my head. One minute I am excited about one thing, next minute that is forgotten and I am on to another. These ideas currently fly away and leave me, mostly never to be seen again and most of a time that's a good thing. Most of these ideas suck! Even so I can't help but think that 1% of them are good and worth growing. This blog is for the 1% to allow me to develop them further. Even so the other 99% are going to pop up as well so readers should take things with a pinch of salt.
For any reader battling through the terrible grammar and spelling I should say who I am. My job is "SOA integration team lead". I lead a team of 3 developers using Oracle SOA suite to create SOAP based integrations between business systems. (Yes I know it's 2018 and I yes, have noticed that everyone slags off soap in every integration talk but what can I do!)
Our platform is old (SOA suite version 11.1.1.7), doesn't contain a rest adaptor, can't talk to the modern internet and needs replacing. Here started my journey into rest, microservices, docker, DevOps, ci, cd, ipass, and lots lots more. Reading, research, personal experiments, playing, London conferences, books etc have taken their toll. My brain which always generates ideas is currently in overload, slamming into a culture wall at my company with ideas good and bad dieing on the vine and experiments remaining just that.
Culture changes though and I am not the only one where I work this is happening to. There are signs of change and the culture wall is cracking. Many changes are happening, even accelerating. This wall will fall and who knows if there will be an ICT department left after. Whatever happens collaboration is key.
And so starts this blog. At what may be the most exciting time in my career. Don't read it if you want expert opinions though. The writer is behind the times and there are many experts out there on the net.
This will be my journey.