Michael Koltsov's den

GENERAL

• Read 12 books
• Gave a talk regarding Akka Persistence
• Went from a role in management to a technical developer/DevOps role

TECHNICAL

Languages I’ve used and abused throughout the year:

Technologies:

Personal

• Went to a swimming pool once per week
• Taught my daughter swimming
• Went to see 8 countries
• Started to play piano
• Learned a new foreign language – Polish
• Bought an apartment
• Went to see how my son was born
• Rode a bicycle throughout the year
• Swam in Adriatic Sea

As my previous attempts to fully learn Bash had been short-living and sporadic I’ve decided that this time I’m going to fully master it in order to prevent myself from writing one-off scripts on high-level languages to do simple stuff that can be easily lifted by Bash.

This book is a great introduction for those who are real new comers, though I thought of myself as of the same kind.

Turns out that’s not the right book for me as it’s not focused on particular aspects I’m interested in (networking, IO). However, it’s nicely written and it will definitely help if you want to have a high-level view on the most important Bash features.

That’s why.

Alice Deejay – Better Off Alone (SnapMandz’ Candlelight Version)

First, I need to confess. I know a half of a dozen of different languages, among them I use 3 of them on a daily basis. Even though I’ve started to learn most of them relatively early due to lack of practice and absence of communication with native speakers my accent is thick. I also do a lot of typical mistakes influenced by my native Slavic language (i.e. I miss the nouns most of the time when I use Germanic-based languages).

But what has recently struck me is that if you know more that one foreign language and you use them day-to-day some tumbler in your head switches and suddenly you’re able to absorb new languages by means of pure anticipation and understanding of common principles that all languages are based upon.

Interestingly, the same idea has struck my daughter who’s already multilingual even though she’s only 5. I wonder how many languages will she be able to speak whilst she’ll be my age.

This year we were on the beautiful Adriatic coastline as well as we toured most of magnificent Italy, astonishing Croatia, and most importantly Slovenia that completely stole my heart as it’s the most beautiful country I’ve been so far.

Next year the plan is to meet our peers in Bulgaria along with visiting the birthplace of Slavic culture in Greece, not to mention checking out Macedonian wine and probably Belgrade will look better while the sun is shining there.

Myself along with daughter Kira are fans of body art, therefore we don’t miss any opportunity that’s available to paint our bodies.

Without any further ado, let me show the best example of the kid’s body art we’ve seen so far. It’s truly a masterpiece compared to all what we’ve experienced before.

I could barely reach the end of this book. I have hardly seen any book that was so boring to read. Most of the book’s CF examples didn’t work for me. Not to mention that some of the services this book is describing have evolved so much that this book will do you more harm than good if you’ll start using those services based on the book.

Apart from the last 4 chapters I reckon that this book could help you quickly brush up your AWS skills.

The last 4 chapters are still relevant. Even though I’d love to see more emphasis on Elastic BeansTalk, as well as it’s a great pity that though the authors have mentioned AWS Lambda&Gateway API that’d preferred to simply ignore it since it wasn’t available in all regions at the time.

cover

As Docker continues to keep its pace as a constantly evolving technology, there’s no book that encompasses all aspects of it. In my opinion, this book came close to that. Though sometimes it doesn’t provide you all technical details it covers a lot of what you need to deal with Docker on a daily basis.

I found the examples that come with the book are so  helpful that even sometimes I could even use them in order to improve some aspects of my daily routine.

The book covers docker 1.8, which API hasn’t changed so much since the book has been written. But some of the networking APIs, docker compose has slightly changed which allows to give this book only 4 stars. Apart from that it’s not  a constantly updated book I can recommend it to anyone who considers Docker as a viable technology.

I’ve started reading this book as a draft long before it was released. I’ve abandoned it for a while, but this fall it was finally released thus I no other excuse to finally finish reading it.

I need to confess that’s not the first Akka book I’ve read so far. By no means this book covers all the aspects of Akka (which is enormously huge, albeit allows you to write full fledged applications based only on itself). But it is THE BOOK I would recommend you to read if you’re interested in Akka right now. The book has been recently updated to reflect the latest changes in  http, persistence and some other modules. Taking into account how quickly does akka keep its pace I would say that after a while without constant updates (which took this book 4 years to get finished) this book could get outdated.

It has the bulk of the info you need to know about Akka to start working with it and get productive. Code that comes on its Github really works (which is rare for books’ code examples) and it can help you get your hands dirty in parts of the AKKA as quickly as possible.

My score is 4/5(I recommend to start reading it right now until it’s too late)

Chelyabinsk is the heaven for those who’s looking for a free broadband connection, it has amazing Internet penetration.

I’m looking forward to get to Slovenia once more

Rome is a great place to roam, leave your devices at home