A downside when working with small and medium-sized businesses is that you have to focus on practical more than theoretical.   Deploying an architecture that is a known entity, using existing staff skills,  with a relatively predictable cost and timeline is important. Small businesses are generally not in a position to fund true R & D for their products.

For this reason, I generally have a number of fun projects going on to keep abreast of new technologies.   Currently, I’m engaged with:

• Alexa Voice Skills and Flash Briefings – with TV/Radio media groups as well as visually impaired
• IOT devices/security/management with Raspberry PI’s

For both of these I’m using many Amazon AWS features with coding being done in NodeJS,  Python, and React primarily.