Lunatech blog retrospective - 2013
2013 brought even more firsts for projects, consultancy, technology and events than the previous year.
If there’s a pattern to what was new in 2013, it is perhaps increasing diversity. There were more approaches to running software projects, rather than all trying to use Scrum, more programming languages, rather than only using Scala, and more conferences than just Devoxx.
Software development
Lunatech feeds Happy Melly was, I think, the most import new thing in software development for us (as a company and as an industry) last year. Working with Happy Melly was our first taste of a different kind of customer-supplier relationship, combined with the next level of agile software development beyond Scrum, using Kanban with #NoEstimates.
Fast Track to Play training certification was perhaps a final step in applying our Play framework experience, followed only by finally publishing the Play for Scala book in October 2013. Typesafe’s training certification is the formalised version of the Play consultancy that we were already selling.
Good bug reports come in four parts was 2013’s entry in the `how everyone can do a thing better but unfortunately don’t care about' category. It would be nice if software development project team members did actually care, but unfortunately it still seems to be okay to write terrible bug reports. Perhaps this is one of the truly hard problems of enterprise IT.
Coding tutorials
iOS full-text search with Core Data and SQLite is Wolfert’s tutorial for iOS developers, based on work on an iOS application for one of our customers. This is the kind of technique that is probably too specific to expect to be `in the manual' but that you hope Google finds when you need to do the same thing yourself.
The series of Typesafe Slick tutorials, on the other hand, are simply describing the basics more carefully than Slick’s very concise manual does:
As of mid-2014, we’re still waiting for someone else to write a good book about Slick, which turns out to be a very useful but barely-documented database access technology. Meanwhile, note that making the Slick 1.0.1 tutorials work with the latest version of Slick 2 is left as an exercise for the reader.
Events
The Joy of Coding 2013 was the year’s first first - a cool new conference in Rotterdam that we really enjoyed.
Sdu Royal Ten - 10km business run followed the previous team running event with another in the Hague, this time with an official photo (above).
Lunatech Hosts and Sponsors Clojure Meetup was the other first: Clojure developer events at Lunatech. Because there’s always a more obscure programming language with a single supporter in the company (Vijay) than whatever else you’re already using, however new and shiny.