2016 Picks

20/12/16

---

This has been an interesting year in terms of personal experiences about Software Engineering. This post is the list of my picks for 2016, grouped by category, of the most notable stuff I ran through during these 366 days.

Best tools

- git

I have increased my knowledge about this essential tool thanks to this course and these two talks:

• Becoming a Git Master, by Nicola Paoloucci
• Wrapping Your Head Around Git, by Paolo ‘Nusco’ Perrotta

Also, since I spent my spare time working on various open source projects, I had the opportunity to improve my git skills also by doing. One of the main goals of my 2017 will be to keep on increasing my git abilities: I hope to turn from git Padawan to git Knight.

- sbt and IntelliJ

My hardest struggle with tools in 2016 was while I was trying to implement a simple sbt plugin using IntelliJ as Scala IDE: I had no experience neither in sbt plugins development nor in IntelliJ indeed, so I spent a lot of time to setup a proper configuration for getting started. Eventually, after evenings spent on tuning my environment, I was able to develop and test my first vanilla sbt plugin using an IDE I had never worked with.

- Heroku

I’ve deployed a set of small services (on free Dyno instances ) using this PaaS: it is well documented and it offers a lot of free tools. I assume I’ll use it also next year.

Best Youtube videos

• Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain by Runar Bjarnason
• Life Beyond the Illusion of Present by Jonas Boner
• Live React: Hot Reloading with Time Travel by Dan Abramov

Best conferences

• Curry On, Rome
• BeeScala, Ljubljana
• NoSlidesConf, Bologna

Best talks

• To Macros and Beyond!, by Eugene Burmako
  @ Curry On, 19th July - Rome
  The academic discussion between Eugene Burmako and Matthias Felleisen has been a mind blowing experience!

• Funny Code, by Matteo Baglini
  @ NoSlidesConf, 3rd December - Bologna
  It was an interesting way to introduce functional programming concepts in Javascript (without a slide deck, indeed)!

• Six years of Scala and counting, by Manuel Bernhardt
  @ BeeScala, 26th November, Ljubljana
  IMHO, this is the right approach to introduce Scala features in appealing way.

Best quotes

• “Your mouse is a database.” Erik Mejier
• “Clarity is the king.” Bob Martin
• “Constraints are freedom.” Runar Bjarnason

Best books

• Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
• sbt in action - Joshua Suereth and Matthew Farwell
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin

Best podcasts

• Functional Geekery Episode 55 – Andreas Stefik
• Functional Geekery Episode 69 – Bartosz Milewski
• How Cognitive Biases Affect Developers

That’s all for 2016.
Merry Christmas and Happy 2017!