This week I’ve been mostly distracted engaged in looking into Heroku and Neo4j.
Heroku is an interesting looking continuous deployment / cloud platform that’s just introduced Scala as a supported language. It looks very slick. You push your git changes up to Heroku and it compiles everything and deploys all in one go. Looks like it would do as a starting point for some free scala hosting at least. Not sure if I would be willing to pay for the privilege though, yet. I’ve looked at CloudBees in the past, who do a nice free/cheap deal for open source projects, and incorporate a hosted Jenkins continuous integration suite too.
Neo4j is a Graph Database. I’d never heard of those before, and they seem very apt for the project I’m thinking of. Previously I’d been exploring MongoDB as a database, but a graph db sounds like it might fit the bill even better. I’ve really only got experience of MySql and SQLite, and want to know more about what all the fuss is about with this so-called NoSQL movement that encompasses Neo4j, MongoDB and a lot more.
Then there’s the inevitable time-warp that is InfoQ videos and YouTube. I think I want to know everything before I get started.
Notable presentations this week on InfoQ are “Can the Kanban Method Avoid Becoming another Management Fad?” and “The Begginer’s Mind“. The former takes a bit to get going, but it’s quite insightful. It’ll make you think a lot about your behaviour in the workplace. Are you as professional as you think? Probably not. The latter presentation is interesting in terms of making you think about your current skill set, and how you learn new skills. I felt a bit sorry for him at the end though when nobody had any questions.
So distraction level 3 I think. The videos are more for work, while Heroku and Neo4j are fairly relevant to my spare time project. At some point I’ve got to choose the technology, stop procrastinating, and start writing some code.