It’s been a busy couple of months. I recently moved from Dublin to London to start working at Gumtree (and loving it so far!). If moving is always a hassle, moving across countries is that hassle tenfold. Fingers crossed everything will be done by Christmas…

I recently finished reading The Lean Startup, a (relatively) new approach on development and innovation on software companies. An interesting and recommended reading for anyone involved in software development.

Scala gives the developer the possibility of using Enumerations. If they should be used or if Case Classes are better is a debate I’m not going to start here. They exist and they can be used.

Mobile is the new king and HTML 5 allows developers to, at last, build once and run everywhere: tablets, phones, desktops…

ScalaDays 2013 happened this past June and the presentations are available at Parleys. If you go to the ScalaDays 2013 channel you can see all of them, and many are completely worth your time.

TL;DR: Clone Ansible for Play Framework to automate the task of deploying Play 2.x projects from a git repository into an EC2 instance.

As many developers I’m not a good sysadmin. That’s why I was happy to see the raise of PaaS like Heroku, which facilitated deploying a webapp without having to spend time in sysadmin tasks which I didn’t know how to do correctly and which took me too much time.

Last week I was experimenting a bit with Redis and its Publish-Subscribe module. The idea was to try to implement a chat with it (something I’ll need for my next project) and from all the options I evaluated this seemed the best. Loving Redis so far, whoever called it the swiss-knife of databases was completely right.

Christmas break is over, and on a whim I started to check AngularJs. If you haven’t tested it yet, do it. I’ve toyed around with Backbone and some other Javascript single page app frameworks, and Angular is by far the one that I liked the most. It has simplicity embedded in its core, and turning tedious tasks (as setting controllers) into something trivial makes it a pleasure to use. Simplicity. Such an important concept, and one which is seldom present in frameworks.

From time to time I like to test some new functionality of Play 2.0. Creating a tiny for-fun project allows me to see that functionality in action, to solve the initial pitfalls related to it and to have a basic sample for later on.

Scala is growing, a lot. The (relatively) recent investment of $14M in the company ensures that the language will be taken care of and any remaining issues (like some necessary improvements for the IDE) tackled. Scala 2.10 is around the corner and with it all the performance and APi improvements. And Play is healthier than ever. Good times to be a Scala fan.