12 Days of Posts: Day 12

Joshua Johanan 12.25.2015 : 271 words

Technically this one is late. I did not account for all the things I would have to do on Christmas eve. Picking a subject and writing around 200 words on it every day for eleven days was more difficult than I expected. I had chosen some subjects before, but 3 were pretty much day of selections.

I wanted these posts to be about the things that I learned or focused on for 2015. I think the main thing I tried to do this year was focus on programming more functionally. The more I learn about functional programming the more I like the way it makes you think. This is especially true from a testing point of view. When writing code I can easily create a lot of little edge cases and then you have to write tests for all of them. If I change how I think about the problem I can usually cut through all of that and make a simpler codebase. I think functional programming does that.

The other thing I have embraced is Docker. I love the ability to have my application running exactly the same in development as production. In my mind this is another simplification of development like functional programming. Once I have it working exactly how I want it in development there is really no work to get it working anywhere else.

This last year has been about writing and developing simpler software. I am not even close to where I think I can be. In 2016 I plan on continuing this. Hopefully you will come with me as well as you read my blog!