2016 in Review

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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:

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

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