News, announces and releases
Atlassian aquired Trello. OMG! I mean... happy for Trello founders. I just hope that the product would remain as good as it was.
Docker 1.13 was released. Using compose-files to deploy swarm mode services is really cool! The new monitoring and build improvements are handy. Also Docker is now AWS and Azure-ready, which is awesome!
Kotlin 1.1 beta was published with a number of interesting new features. I have mixed feelings, however. For instance, I really find type aliases an awesome feature, but the definition keyword, "typealias", feels too verbose. Just "alias" would have been much nicer.
Meanwhile, Kotlin support was announced for Spring 5. I think this is great - Kotlin suppot in the major frameworks will definitely help the adoption.
Is there anyone using Eclipse? [trollface] Buildship 2.0 for Eclipse is available, go grab it! :)
Resonating articles
RethinkDB: Why we failed. Probably the best post-mortem that I have ever read. You will notice a strange kvetch at first about the tough market and how noone wants to pay. But then reading forward the author honestly lists what was really wrong. Sad that it didn't take off, it was a great project.
The Dark Path - probably the most contradicting blog post I've read recently. Robert Martin takes his word on Swift and Kotlin. A lot of people, the proponents of strong typing, reacted to this blog post immediately. "Types are tests!", they said. However, I felt like Uncle Bob just wrote this articles to repeat his point about tests: "it doesn't matter if your programming language strongly typed or not, you should write tests". No one would disagree with this statement, I believe. However, the followup article was just strange: "I consider the static typing of Swift and Kotlin to have swung too far in the statically type-checked direction." OMG, really!? Did Robert see Scala or Haskell? Or Idris? IMO, Swift and Kotlin hit the sweet spot in regards to type system that would actually _help_ the developers without getting in the way. Quite a disappointing read, I have to say..
Java 9
JDK 9 is feature complete. Those are great news. Now, it would be nice to see how will the ecosystem survive with all the issues related to reflective access. Workarounds exist, but there should be a proper solution without such hacks. Jigsaw caused a lot of concerns here and there but the bet is that in the long run, the benefits will outweigh the inconveniences.
Misc
The JVM is not that heavy
15 tricks for every web dev
Synchronized decorators
Code review as a gateway
How to build a minimal JVM container with Docker and Alpine Linux
Lagom, the monolith killer
Reactive Streams and the weird case of backpressure
Closures don’t mean mutability.
How do I keep my git fork up to date?
Predictions for 2017
Since it is the beginning of 2017, it is trendy to make predictions for the trends of the upcoming year. Here are some prediction by the industry thought leaders:
Adam Bien’s 2017 predictions
Simon Ritter’s 2017 predictions
Ted Neward’s 2017 predictions
