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2021 recap and new year’s resolutions

This year I had no time to blog, so I spent some time on this final day for this brief recap of relevant stuff I accomplished in 2021.

Quitting a job in June

I was totally burned out because of the toxic environment at my previous employer, so in spring I made the decision to quit there. After a journey of interviews lasting around two months, I eventually stumbled upon the right position at PagoPA S.p.A.: it is a very cool company, where I can finally do Scala programming at a professional level. So far I am very happy with the position! After a decade spent working for Italian companies, finally I found the right spot, where the tech people are eager to learn, to share ideas and to adopt the best engineering practices 🥰.

Smart working as new normal

By chance, this position should be full remote indefinitely besides COVID-19 evolution. That’s a game changer to me, since I am able to stay focused on my job duties in a cozy and familiar environment avoiding the annoying commuting. I was actually looking for a full remote position since 2015, maybe. Now, I have to admit, I am professionally happier than ever.

Technical Development Editor @Manning

Also in 2021, I’ve been a Technical Development Editor for two books: Spring Boot in Practice and OpenID Connect in Action. Both are very good ones! Besides my editor activities this experience has been useful to learn a lot of new stuff during the process. Also, as a side note, I’ve been the Technical Proofer of Grokking Functional Programming. This one is another gem, that can be very helpful for people willing to learn the basics of this programming paradigm.

Open Source Contributor

This year I did not contribute too much to Open Source projects. I opened only few PRs to camunda/feel-scala (it is an interpreter of FEEL language) and fixed some issues of P3trur0/vue-country-flag, that is a small Vue component I wrote some years ago. This was a tiny one, but it gained some traction and nowadays it used by 1.1k applications and it has around 75k monthly downloads. Because of this, even though it started as a toy component, now I have duties towards its small community of users complaining about some issues, such as converting it to a Vue3 component.

Becoming a dad 👨🏻‍🍼

Needless to say, it is the biggest achievement of my life. Accomplished on the 24th of August 2021, at 6.54 AM.

My best of

🎼 Albums

  1. Peace or Love - Kings of Convenience
  2. Non esiste amore a Napoli - TROPICO
  3. MADAME - Madame

📚 Books

  1. La guerra dei dieci anni. Jugoslavia 1991-2001, by A. Marzo Magno et al.
  2. Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling, by D. Ghosh
  3. Flavio Giurato. Le gocce di sudore più puro, by G. Ciao

New year’s Resolutions

Here follows my quick and dirty 2022 resolutions list:

I hope to check at least half of the bullet points above 🤓 ✅