As part of trying to be more productive whilst working from home I have been writing a daily work journal. This is to help with tracking what I have actually been doing with my time, as well as record all those times I go “I really should learn not to do this again”. I did a similar thing during my PhD using VimWiki, a wiki and diary plugin for The One True Editor.

Pandoc Markdown I have used Latex to write documents for many years including writing my MSc dissertation. It is a hell of a lot better than using LibreOffice or Google Docs for large pieces of work, not least because it means I can write everything using the one true editor. Watching my partner trying to open her 60k word PhD thesis in MS Word gave me nightmares for days! But much like my journey from Java to Python, I have moved from Latex to Pandoc Markdown, because frankly life is too short for all those “" and “{ }”!

TL;DR Caladrius is the result of a 4 month internship with Twitter’s Real Time Compute team. It is a service that interfaces with the Heron stream processing system and models the performance of topologies running within it. Caladrius has the ability to predict future incoming workloads (based on sufficient historical data) which allows the performance of a running topology to be checked against that expected workload, giving the option to pre-emptively scale the topology before that workload arrives.

Yesterday I started my internship with the Real Time Compute team at Twitter! I will be working on applying the findings of my performance modelling research for Apache Storm topologies to Twitter’s Heron system. I arrived last week and spent the time mainly getting over my jet lag and finding the grocery store! Well I am nearly over my jetlag, been busy exploring SF and catching up with old friends. I can't wait to start my internship @Twitter on Monday (I can see the office from my front door)!