Today, I interviewed a senior developer candidate at OnShift. I value passion and continuous learning over experience alone. Key questions included understanding SOLID principles, designing a small commerce site, technology stack choices, integration and deployment strategies, secure handling of customer data, and proposing new technologies. I seek candidates with a strong grasp of these concepts and a drive to improve.

In January 2015, I shared an article by Martin Fowler on feature toggles with my colleagues, Dean and Bryce. The article explores the complexity and use of toggles for cohort, A/B testing, and feature releases. At OnShift, I recently developed a "feature permission" REST endpoint for beta testing new features in our mobile apps, which I may rename to "feature toggle." We're also using Google Analytics to track user flow and feature adoption.

At OnShift, a Cleveland-based startup, I transitioned from 9 years of Java development to embracing Python. After a month of immersion, I appreciate Python's readability and extensive standard library. I explored the ecosystem through podcasts and compared Java and Python tools, collections, and frameworks. This shift has broadened my development perspective and highlighted the vibrant Python community.

In February 2015, I joined Explorys, a company using Hadoop to manage and sell vast amounts of hospital data. Hadoop's distributed processing and fault tolerance make it ideal for big data despite the single point of failure at the name node. Key points from "Hadoop - The Definitive Guide" include its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and powerful data processing capabilities. The book provides insights into Hadoop's MapReduce framework, HDFS, and ecosystem, highlighting its role in efficient big data management.

In December 2014, I explored "Effective Java" by Joshua Bloch, uncovering valuable best practices. Key concepts included using static factory methods for readability, minimizing accessibility and mutability for better encapsulation, preferring composition over inheritance, leveraging generics for type safety, and implementing singletons with enums. These insights will enhance my coding practices at Explorys.

In November 2014, I moved back to Ohio from Florida, taking a new job at Explorys. I've expanded my technical skills in just four weeks, adding Ruby/Rails, Hadoop/HBase, Maven, Git, JOOQ, and Dependency Injection via CDI to my toolkit. This transition has been both challenging and enriching, providing new growth opportunities.