With over 25 years of experience in the Java ecosystem, I specialize in building high-scale, real-time recommendation engines and distributed data platforms.
I am currently 6 months out from launching a new venture in the Machine Learning and Cloud Services space, focusing on low-latency decision intelligence.
Entering the third week of my startup adventure has been a deeply rewarding time of solidifying foundations. Things come together to form an official brand, I put together tools to help with financial discipline, and I finished off the week by practicing my own Documentation-as-a-Contract (DaaC) framework.
While I have an idea that I truly believe in and know exactly the components I need to build, I have been feeling excited about this venture before starting. But one question that would keep entering my mind, “What do you tell people your business is called?”
In my first post, I wrote about why I spent my first week writing zero business logic and instead built rig - our lightweight, POSIX-compliant local provisioning tool. It was my way of rejecting “wiki-ops” and applying Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) discipline to our local environments so that a hardware failure means minutes of downtime, not a week.
But as I transitioned into Week Two, I was hit by a different kind of operational reality check.
Being made redundant from a position where I defined patterns and practices for a high-performance team, I decided to take the leap to create my own startup. As I write now, this has felt like a violent acceleration of the clock. One day you feel the safety of an established enterprise; the next, there I am, standing on a clean slate. When I finally received my new laptop last week, I felt the sudden urge to rush, install the software I needed, and start churning out lines of code.