It's finally time. After reprising one final Eclipse plug-in development role in later half of 2018, I've left that behind, and I've been training and re-skilling in backend and cloud tech. I know I said goodbye to Eclipse already, but - like in the plot of Rambo III - I got brought back last year... (although in this case with a lucrative contract 😁)
Well, what am I learning now then? Scala for starters, that one I was keen to for some time now. I already knew the basics of the language, but I've been mastering the more advanced aspects of Scala. I also plan to have a look at the library ecosystem and its more prominent projects (cats and the Typelevel stack, scalaz, etc)
Next up are the Big Data technologies. I've already started learning Spark - indeed, this was the main material of course 4 of the Coursera Functional Programming in Scala Specialization MOOC. But I also want to learn Kafka and possibly Flink, Cassandra, and others - if I have the time.
Last but not least, on the more general backend & microservices tech side I'm planning to learn Akka, AWS, Docker and Kubernetes.
It's a bit daunting as it is a lot of material to cover and train. I've left my job so I can study full-time, and will be doing that for at least 3-4 months. On top of that, I'm not sure how well will employers receive this kind of transition, since I will have little to no commercial experience in all of this kind of tech. Interesting times ahead, but either way, looking forward to it! 👊
