A few weeks ago I needed to parse configuration files in Scala for a Spark project and decided to use PureConfig. It is incredibly lean to use, needing minimal boilerplate. I recommend you check it out (give also a look at CaseClassy, which I haven’t had time to test yet). Everything seemed straightforward enough, and I got it working pretty quickly (as in, it compiled properly). The surprise? spark-submit failed with a conflict with Shapeless (lacking a witness).

• Apache Spark
• scala

Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use. At last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year Work February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation.

• Go
• Data
• Python
• Scala
• Maths

I have been looking for the perfect, really portable Bluetooth keyboard for several years. Typing on the go, or having a truly mobile office in your pockets is a really interesting concept for a consultant like me. You never know when opportunity or need may arise. A year and a half ago I ordered what it looked like the perfect keyboard for that setup, but (even though it was supposed to arrive 3-4 months later) I’m still waiting.

• Keyboard

This has been the first time I could attend the Apache Kafka meetup in London. Previous meetings had me in Barcelona or flying. First realisation: it is a surprisingly crowded meetup! Clearly, everyone is using Kafka, even if it is not clear from the outside. Oh, and the food was pretty good, too. Thanks to the sponsor (which I have sadly forgotten). I really enjoyed this one. The speaker was Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent (and author of I Heart Logs), so, basically, a Kafka top committer himself.

• London
• Scala
• Kafka

At Affectv we use a wide range of editors: Sublime, Atom, Emacs, Pycharm, IntelliJ… Actually only two people use the same editor! As such, from time to time I see things in other people’s editors that I would like to have as well. So, yesterday I decided to improve on some configuration settings on Spacemacs. Click for multiple-cursors I saw this on Jordi’s Sublime, and it is much more comfortable than using more-like-this or similar helper functions, even if I need to use the trackpad to do so.

• emacs
• Scala
• spacemacs

A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs. In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.

• Programming
• emacs
• spacemacs
• vim
• Productivity