Scala

Day after Codemotion 2015, this is my overall opinion of the event: meh. Don’t get me wrong, technical sessions have been quite interesting, full of really nice people and organization must have worked really to get the event running. But, in my opinion, this event is dying of success. Way too many assistants, making really hard to walk from one session to another (even having 15 min between them), or having to arrive 30 min before start if you’re intention was to have a nice place to plug your laptop and be able to see the presentation.

In little less than a week, a new edition of Coursera’s course, Principles of Reactive Programming from Martin Odersky, Erik Meijer and Roland Kuhn, is launching. This course is a follow-up of Principles of Functional Programming in Scala, which I took in its first edition and which I enjoyed a lot. I’ve regretted missing out first edition of this second course for a long time (more than a year, in fact), so if you want to learn about this magnificent frameworks of the Scala world, don’t miss this chance!

It’s been a little more than a year since Java 8 was released (2014/03/18) and you might think that it’s a little too late for a What’s new in post. In fact latest public update available is 8u40, so let’s review not only what was initially included in Java 8, but what else has changed during this first year, up to release 8u40. Lots of changes were included in the initial Java 8 release, being probably the most notable of them, in my opinion (feel free to disagree, looking forward to discussions):

During last year, I had the chance to work as CTO of a startup, working mainly within MEAN stack. I was happy, the technology I was working with was in a great hype and its community grew bigger and bigger with lots of projects popping up everywhere. But life is continuously changing, and I started to work in a new company within Java/JEE technologies. I was back to my first days as a professional computer engineer. Java ecosystem is huge, and there are some well established tools that you must control if you want to progress as Java developer. But Java -the language- is getting older, and newer languages are more expressive and require less boiler plate code (don’t get me wrong, JVM is a great platform, and probably the best one for enterprise applications). Even with the recent release of Java 8, which introduced Lambdas and some functional style capabilities, I still feel like writing too much, or at least much more than with other languages.