What have I been learning lately/What Have I been reading lately (March/April 2018)

It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post like this.

However, I’ve been busy and I have a few things to show for it:

Exciting Meetups Attended:

• Thomas Nield- Datascience with Kotlin
  • This was a fantastic meetup that involved Optaplanner, SMILE, RxJavaFX, and had a few demonstrations.
  • This brought back memories of my school days using AMPL and Operations Research.
• Went to the Oracle Code: Chicago Java 10 release
  • I took notes: https://github.com/monksy/oraclecode2018-notes

Projects That I’ve been working on:

• • Scala99
    • This is a few of my attempts at the Scala 99 practice problems.
  • Temperature Sensor Data Generator
    • This is a utility project that will generate a series of data from sensors that closely resemble a day’s change in temperature.
    • This is to generate a large enough dataset to really demonstrate large-scale distributed processing
  • CQRS Framework
    • An extendable framework used to track events throughout a data object’s lifespan.
    • Using Shapeless
    • Currently on hold until I can fully wrap my head arround Shapeless
  • Sample Akka-HTTP Based Application for Inventory Pricing
    • This is a sample Akka HTTP Based application that responds to Time based requests for inventory.
    • Akka HTTP was a bit irritating to setup the routing.

Technologies I’m Learning Right Now

• Apache Spark
• The Play Web Framework
• Amazon RedShift
• Shapeless

Books Read:

• Programming In Scala: Third Edition by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners
  • Fantastic book. A blog post is coming up
• The way of baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH
  • This was a fantastic book about being a high perofrmer:
    • The stress
    • The demand from others
    • About how meditating and highly focused practivebrings improvement
  • This resonated a lot with me as a software engineer.
• The Chicago Cubs: Story Of A Curse
  • This felt more of half about the drama sorrounding the Cub’s experience between World Series wins and an attempt to convey history.

Things I’ve Mastered/Dealt with Cooking

• Sous Viding
  • Experimented with Octopus (They were a bit too small to get right, and this was done with Sous Viding)
  • The Perfect Steak and Crust on the outside
  • Dry Aging Ribeye Steaks
• Keto
  • Lemon Bars
  • Tirmasu Fudge
  • I’m very close to making a stock

Books I’m Currently Reading

• Spark In Action
• Play For Scala

Topics I want to learn/read about

• Optaplanner
• More with IOT
  • I had a chance to work with a Seed WIO wifi based IOT board
  • I bought a Nano PI from FriendlyElec.
• Cassandra
• ElasticSearch
• Going further indepth with Kafka
• Akka Typed