About me

Hi! My name is Elroy Parkinson. I live in Johannesburg, South Africa and this is my blog.

I am a Solutions Architect with 20 year’s experience as an IT professional. I have a very analytical mind and love finding elegant, simple, cost-effective technical solutions to tough business problems. I am particularly interested in Cloud Architecture, containerization using Kubernetes, Agile software development and Spring Boot micro-services.

I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Port Elizabeth (now the Melson Mandela Metropolitan University) and an MBA from Charles Sturt University in Australia.

Me on the web:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Github
• Goodreads
• Flickr

About my blog

Topics

This blog started out way in 2013. You can read about how embarrassingly optimistic I was about it (as well as the corny reason for the title) in my first post here.

Mostly I cover Software Development and Architecture topics that I’ve had to think about - either as part of my work or sometimes just out interest. I find writing down my thoughts helps me clarify and internalise them. Coming back to what I’ve written years later also serves to remind me how wrong I can be sometimes despite having been so confident at the time. It’s a valuable life lesson. 😄

Technical details

As I said, this blog started out on Google’s https://www.blogger.com following a (rare) New Year’s resolution in 2013. That platform is still around but nowhere near as active as it used to be and so for 2021 I’ve decided to self-host on Google’s Cloud platform using Hugo, a Jamstack framework - mostly as a way to learn more about the tech. The details are probably a good topic for a future post.

Side Hustle

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Published Papers

During my time as a post grad student, I managed to publish two papers that started my interest in using AI techniques to solve planning and scheduling problems. AI planning is a topic that seems to have taken a back seat in recent times to the deep learning craze.

• Parkinson E & Warren PR (1995) A comparison of graph colouring techniques. South African Computer Journal, Number 14, 1995
• Parkinson, E. & Warren, P.R. (1996) Examination timetabling. Industry Meets Academia: Proceedings of the 1996 National Research and Development Conference, The South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists, Interaction Conference Centre, University of Natal, Durban, 26 & 27 September, hosted by The Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, edited by Vevek Ram, (ISBN 0-620-20568-7)

Thanks for reading!