To paraphrase Bill Gates, most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. I definitely underestimated my 2015 and found it rewarding to go back and realize just how much happened. I published a book. I moved to Italy. I started a company. I did a lot of traveling. And a whole lot more:
Happy new year!
Most Popular Blog Posts
First up, for the followers of my blog, here are my most popular blog posts from 2015:
A productive development environment with Docker on OS X
In this post, I'm going to explain why the way most programmers install, configure, and manage software in development, testing, and production environments is a ...
Should I start a company or work for one?
My blog post on O’Reilly Radar: Should I start a company or work for one?
Are static typing and functional programming winning?
Inspired by a reddit discussion, I decided to create short blog post to ask two questions:
The Competent Programmer
In literature, The Competent (Wo)man is a character who exhibits a very wide range of abilities and knowledge. The idea is similar to a Polymath or a Renaissanc...
A Crash Course on Design for Developers
This is a talk I gave at TechHub Riga that introduces the basic tools of user-centered and visual design. It’s targeted at developers and any other design newbies...
A Guide to Hiring for your Startup
On April 30, 2015, I gave a talk called "A Guide to Hiring for your Startup", where I discussed what to look for in a candidates, where to find them, how to inter...
Running Docker on AWS from the ground up
Docker is an awesome tool. In a previous post, I showed how you can use it to package your code so that it runs exactly the same way in development and in product...
New Projects
Next, here are the new projects I launched in 2015:
Atomic Squirrel
https://www.atomic-squirrel.netIn 2015, I founded Atomic Squirrel, a company that specialized in helping new startups get off the ground. In 2016, Atomic Squirrel merged with another company called Phoenix DevOps to become Gruntwork.
Hello, Startup
https://www.hello-startup.net/This book is the "Hello, World" tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. I based it off of my own experiences, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. If you're at all interested in startups, this book is for you.
docker-osx-dev
https://github.com/brikis98/docker-osx-devAn open source project that allows you to setup a productive development environment with Docker on OS X.
Ping-Play: BigPipe Streaming for the Play Framework
https://github.com/brikis98/ping-playAn open source project that brings BigPipe streaming to the Play Framework. It includes tools for a) splitting your pages up into small "pagelets", which makes it easier to maintain large websites, and b) streaming those pagelets down to the browser as soon as they are ready, which can significantly reduce page load time.
Herman van der Veer Homepage
https://github.com/brikis98/yevgeniy-brikman-homepageI built all the pages you're looking at now using Jekyll, GitHub Pages, and Basscss.
Travel and Other Activities
And finally, here are some of my trips and adventures from 2015:
Herman van der Veer
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like my books, Hello, Startup and Terraform: Up & Running. If you need help with DevOps or infrastructure, reach out to me at Gruntwork.