Here’s my first attempt to summarize most important things happened in my professional life (mostly programming) this year, for future self. May be it’ll be interesting for someone else too.
Bench -> Mobify
Probably one of the hardest decisions I made was to leave Bench Accounting. I wrote all details here, so I’m not going to repeat myself.
I do want to mention that I was in a Director role in 2016 and I spent a lot of time managing different teams and mentoring people. That was a great experience! And I still had time to contribute to Scala/Akka and Node.js projects.
Mobify surprised me in a few different ways. Good: project/product management is amazing! Also, Mobify is an early adopter for a lot of bleeding edge mobile web tech, like Progressive Web Apps and Payment Request API. Bad: as usual, lack of people. Pretty much every startup experiences that.
I had a chance to contribute to the internal Progressive Web SDK (ES6/React/Redux), which felt great, because I didn’t work with front-end for a while and it was a nice opportunity to catch up.
Also it was exciting to explore and contribute to Scala/Kafka/Flink combo in a real-world streaming processing use case (I hope to do it more in 2017).
We have some big plans for Q1 I’m going to mention soon ;-)
Interviews
It was a long time since I had been interviewed, so I was a bit lost when I decided to find a new job. I quickly realized that for successful interview I just need to have two things:
- Ability to code really fast in a familiar environment
- Good knowledge of algorithms and data structures. Thanks to bigocheatsheet.com and www.hackerrank.com
Blog
I had a goal to publish at least one blog post per month. So, as a result I wrote and published 12 posts in 2016 (including this one). Achievement unlocked! :-D I’m planning to publish at least 15 posts in 2017.
Also I’ve finally moved this blog to AWS S3/Cloudfront, now it’s blazing fast and highly available!
Some annual stats about the blog:
- Pageviews: 13521
- Average session duration: 37 seconds
- Top 5 countries: USA, Canada, Germany, UK, India
- New / Returning visitor ratio: 80 / 20
Conferences / Talks / Workshops
I visited 3 conferences and a few meetups this year. Mostly events in Vancouver:
- Polyglotconf
- DevOps Days
- Scala Meetup
- AWS User Group
- ReactJS Meetup
- … probably something else I forgot to remember :)
Also, finally visited Strange Loop conference in St. Louis!
Not a lot of events, but DevOps Days and Strange Loop were really really great!
I also visited 3-days iDDD workshop with Vaughn Vernon! Lots of wisdom and hands-on experience, did my first Event Storming exercise.
I presented twice this year (Polyglotconf and AWS User Group in Vancouver), and I’m planning to do it more in 2017. I have some exciting news! Two of my workshop proposals are confirmed, I’m going to conduct full-day “Building Microservices with Scala and Akka” workshop at Microxchg Conference (Berlin, February 2017) and “Deep Dive Into Scala and Akka” full-day workshop at Craft Conf (Budapest, April 2017). And it’s just a beginning of the year ;-)
Things I Learned
- Scala is getting popular, but slowly
- I still like CoffeeScript, but ES6 is the future
- Docker Docker Docker
- “Micro” in microservices doesn’t mean a lot
- DevOps is really hard
- Local development tooling, thanks JM!
- Like: Kafka, Docker Swarm, Rust, React
- Dislike: Go