Went from a role in management to a technical developer/DevOps role
TECHNICAL
Languages I’ve used and abused throughout the year:
Scala – 6/10 Nice language, though it needs too much attention in comparison with other languages I know and the code is less beautiful than in Clojure/Lisp, some parts are clunky
Javascript – 7/10 Easy to use, refreshed my knowledge of ES6 in a couple of hours, enormous ecosystem, ugly
Bash – 4/10 – After I’ve started to use bash more it has become a huge disappointment for me as its capabilities are very limited
Python – can’t really put a score for it since I haven’t really learned it. However, that didn’t stop me from using it. Nice language, but some parts are really lame and disputable.
Technologies:
React/Redux – 7/10 Nice framework, its ubiquitous usage of FP paradigms helps are lot to educate the newcomers. Though I find it less productive than Angular. Nevertheless, it was just this year’s JS framework that got most of the hype
Docker – 10/10 Initially, I was diminishing its importance due to its apparent simplicity and my shallow knowledge of it. But after I wrap by head around it and saw some of its features in integration with other products my mind was blown. It’s the technology of the year for me. I’m not going ever to install anything on a Vagrant machine myself since there’s Docker for Mac since this year.
AWS – 7/10 Worked with RDS, Dynamo, CloudFormation, S3 (Scala driver written by enthusiasts sucks), Route53, EC2, ECS, Elastic BeansTalk. I have no idea why would anyone build their own private cloud whatsoever since Amazon has most of the features you need, though at a price.
Couchbase – 6/10 Mongo-like in-memory database, works fast, search/aggregation/API is ugly.
PostgreSQL – 8/10 Solid as a rock, has rightfully claimed a space in my heart as a default relational DB I’d use for my projects. JSON integration works there. Makes MySql irrelevant.
Spark/AKKA – 8/10 Cool tech, though sometimes have unpredictable behavior due to inherited complexity from other technologies they’re built upon
SBT/AKKA.NET – 5/10 Both are having a steep learning curve, though after you’ve spent your time on learning them are nice. Unfortunately, there’re other tools/technologies much friendlier/productive for their users.
Mesos/Marathon – 8/10 Hard to understand, though unbelievably powerful. Gives you autoscaling/loadbalancing out of the box