Reactive data processing and a huge wealth of learning - A year as an Apprentice II at endjin
I've just completed my first year working full time for endjin, after I joined as an Apprentice II last May.
And without sounding too much like a cliché, time has truly flown. In the ins-and-outs of daily working life I haven't really noticed the huge progress I've made in the last year, but as we were going through my career development plan last week, I realised how much I'd learnt!
I've been involved in a huge number of exciting projects since last May. Just to name a couple, these included building modern data processing pipelines which fed machine learning models to give real business insights, and reactive processing engines capable of processing millions of events a second in real time!
These projects have really opened my eyes to the huge expanse of possibilities and opportunities for insight through data science.
As part of the apprenticeship, I am also given the opportunity to spend a significant proportion of my time expanding my knowledge. Over the past year, I've attempted to consolidate that knowledge as I go. Twenty-five blogs later, here are the main topics I've covered in the last year:
- The inner workings of C# (as part of a larger re-going-over of the language)
- Encryption and Blockchain
- Rx
- Design patterns
- Software architecture
- Agile estimation and project planning
- TPL Data flow
- A huge wealth of Azure services, including AAD permissions, Azure Functions, Databricks, ADF and Mapping Data Flows, etc. etc.
- Binary and hexadecimal (as part of a project in which we were experimenting with zero-allocation data processing)
And that's just the stuff I've gotten around to blogging about…
So overall, the last year has been a complete whirlwind of learning, and data, and incredibly exciting moments where the huge value in what we were doing became strikingly apparent. (The one which especially springs to mind is where we were suddenly able to detect spikes in error messages in a specific location amongst a millions-of-message-a-second cloud of noise).
I am so excited to progress to the next level of my apprenticeship, and to continue immersing myself in the complex and exciting challenges that we solve every day here at endjin.
And if you're reading this and thinking that you'd find all this as exciting as I do, then send over a copy of you CV to hello@endjin.com! We're always on the lookout for new apprentices to join our team, and I cannot emphasise enough how great of an opportunity for learning and expanding the apprenticeship truly is!
