What interests me now in software

Brett Morgan

• 1 min read

As a software developer I continually check out what's new in software. Whether it is a programming language, framework, or application, I love checking things out and seeing how they might help me, or teach me something new. Here's what I'm looking at now.

  • Clojure - I steered clear of it for a long time, but recently found a great tutorial, Clojure for the Brave and True. It's a great way to dive into Clojure and understand functional programming. It might be easier to get Scala into my workplace, but understanding Clojure will strengthen my functional use of Scala.
  • Emacs - and oldie by goody, Clojure integration with Emacs is nice (see tutorial above). While IDE's like Eclipse and IDEA are nice, they can get bloated. Emacs is speedy. Now if I could only remember all the shortcuts.
  • Play Framework - Great web framework if you want to get started with Scala (works with Java also).
  • Twitter Libraries - I've become a big fan of the libraries that Twitter has opensourced. Lots of great stuff. Here are the ones dug into.
    • Finagle - RPC framework used at Twitter. I need to get the stodgy old bank I work for to start using this. Protocol agnostic, use http, Thrift or something else to talk between systems.
      • Scrooge - Thrift code generator for Scala
    • Zipkin - Distributed tracing. If you have a distributed architecture, it is really hard to figure where in the chain that problem lies without tracing. I know from experience. I'm currently looking to add distributed tracing to system I work on.
    • Bootstrap - Web front-end framework. Great library to allow developers to make usable, good looking sites without a designer.
  • Node.js - I've just played around with it a bit, and can see the interest. Lot's of plugins are being developed. I quickly set up team chat client/server with socket.io plugin. Plus the fantastic blogging software I use is written on top of Node, Ghost.
  • Yet to look at, but interested in

To stay informed I use Pinboard, a social bookmarking site that heavily slanted towards techies.