Colin Webb

I've spent the last year using AWS DynamoDB at work. When we initially searched for a Scala client for DynamoDB, we had the following criteria:

• Good for Scala beginners
• Up to date
• Well documented

Sadly, none of the Scala libraries available at that time matched all three criteria. The most up-to-date libraries were not suitable for a team starting out with Scala and DynamoDB. The most beginner-friendly libraries were out-of-date, and most only had superficial documentation.

I recently started playing with Haskell's Warp in my effort to learn Haskell. Warp is small and fast web server, and doesn't come bundled with much. It also has no "magic" in it, which I think is a very good thing.

This blog post differs from my usual ones; I'm writing it as I learn something. As such, it is more of a story that contains errors and misunderstanding than a factual blog post.

I write software for a living, and most of my side projects are software based too. I view side projects as a tool for learning. Learning by doing.

Elm is a functional programming language aimed at the browser. It aims to replace all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It borrows a lot from Haskell, and promises that if your Elm code compiles, it will run without exceptions.

Using custom types in Play Framework’s routes file is a major win, and is not something obviously supported.

Cassandra Time-To-Live (TTL) is decribed in the Datastax documentation. This blog post briefly explores it to demonstrate that TTL is set per column, and not per row.

Scala has nice abstractions for asynchronous code. However, writing tests for that code sometimes results in an ugly, unreadable mess. Fortunately, ScalaTest has built-in support for testing Futures, in addition to utilities for other types of asynchronous testing, such as polling and test-probes.

'Agile' may now be an overloaded term abused by all kinds of people, but the original manifesto is actually still quite relevant. The second point is:

Working software over comprehensive documentation

This is useful to embrace in many circumstances, and can be expanded to:

You should intially favour building software over documenting it. Comprehensive documentation can come later.

As the end of the year approaches, Twitter has a hash-tag named #Code2014 that encourages people to tweet which programming languages they've been using over the last 12 months.