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](https://github.com/monksy/scala99)


  * This is a few of my attempts at the [Scala 99 practice problems.](https://aperiodic.net/phil/scala/s-99/)





* [Temperature Sensor Data Generator](https://github.com/monksy/datagenerator-sensorweather)


  * 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](https://github.com/monksy/cqrsframework)


  * 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](https://github.com/monksy/daypricing)


  * 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