New Job, New Learning Opportunities

It’s been a while since my last post. To be honest I have been extremely busy with so many personal things that I’m surprised I made it out alive.
During this time, I managed to find a new job in an international advertising company that has an office, here in Beijing. I still haven’t completely managed to get my visa situation completed here in China (a word of caution, with the Beijing Olympics coming up soon, there has been a serious crack down on foreigners living in Beijing and worsening of conditions) and I need to leave the country and come back just to renew my visa (almost all foreigners need to do that).

In my new job, they use Oracle databases, so I’m worried about how much time I can spend on MySQL related issues. I am, however, committed to do my “pet projects” on MySQL – which is why I have this blog.

I am eager to learn what Oracle has to offer. I haven’t worked for such a large company before and I would like to see what real solutions they have to offer (and maybe steal some ideas). I have always worked for small companies which forced me to learn about (and be responsible for) everything, which is what lead me to MySQL in the first place.


Also, I was asked to write an article for the MySQL developer zone. I was a bit surprised since I don’t have as much experience as the previous authors there, but I decided that I would try to write it anyway. Even though I am not (yet) as technical as the people who wrote there, I tried to instead, simplify and make clear some things that I already wrote about in my blog. I hope that the article gets accepted there.

I am still very interested in decision trees, business rules and decision theory. Basically, how us humans make decisions and then how do we explain it to computers. However, I am still sticking to the business side of making decisions and not the AI side which is to make computers make decisions based on data.

I would like to come up with something that just makes things simpler. I strongly believe that when you make thing simpler, you can challenge more complicated things. I am still planning on how to best use my simplified business rules engine idea and I hope that experience from my new job will help me solidify my idea.


Thank you for reading my blog.