KotlinConf 2019 has come to a close, and overall it was a fantastic event. The Kotlin community is an extremely diverse group of folks who genuinely love thier Kotlin, and are basically all just the nicest people in the world. This was my first time at KotlinConf and I’ll be doing everything I can to make sure I don’t miss it next year. The team had a great conference lined up starting with the locale.
Continue readingJust about one month ago, a group of us from Liberty Mutual open sourced a project that we had been working on for a long time internally called Herman. Herman is a tool which simplifies the deployment of containerized applications to AWS ECS and the provisioning of other AWS services.
Continue readingFor many Kotlin adopters coming from Java, it’s natural to start writing Kotlin in the same style that you’re used to. After all, many of the constructs and libraries are the same, so it’s easy to continue writing code the same way you always have. Kotlin is all about saving time and improving code
maintainability through
readability, and these Java conventions frequently detract from that.
Continue readingUsing BDD techniques to drive canary release validation and automation
Continue readingJust 6 months ago, JetBrains Kotlin language hit 1.0 release and became the newest contender in the arena of JVM languages. Kotlin is interesting because it was released out of need for JetBrains, who was seeking a language to cut down on the size of their codebase in their products. This means that it’s here to stick around for a while, and tooling support is going to be first class coming from JetBrains.
Continue readingOctober marks DigitalOcean’s hacktoberfest, an event which I’ve had some participation in for the past two years. This event exists to encourage contributions to open source on GitHub.
Last year, my total commits through the month of October earned me a commemorative t-shirt, which I felt a bit guilty about receiving given that almost all of my commits were to personal projects in some form (though, that code was and still is open source).
Continue readingThis post is inspired by a tweet that I came across today from DigitalOcean:
We asked developers in Vancouver: What was the first program that you can remember writing?
Here are the answers: https://t.co/UqmM1P1Ftn
— DigitalOcean (@digitalocean) October 2, 2015 I was really impressed with a lot of the responses in the video. I certainly remember my first program, and it was nowhere near as awesome as building a FTP client in C++.
Continue readingIf you’ve stumbled here, you’ve found my blog! You can find out some information about me on my about page, but here’s some more of my history.
I started in this field by building a small tiny company with a friend doing web design for local businesses while we were still in high school. We were doing what we thought to be some really cool stuff at the time, taking some bold design ideas and learning how to implement them.
Continue reading