2016 in review

• December 25, 2016
• software-engineering  
• review  

A review of the events that took place this year, related to software engineering and architecture.

The conferences, talks, and events

These are some of the events I participated in:

• (2 Apr 2016) PROTOSEC 2016¹: A technical conference about networking, protocols, security, and related topics.
• (July 2016) EuroPython 2016: I attended several talks, trainings, workshops, and presented a talk.
• (10 Sep 2016) Python Córdoba meetup²: interesting meetup where I presented my talk at EuroPython and attended the sprints afterwards.
• (14 Sep 2016) ArqConf Meetup ¿Cómo es trabajar distribuido globalmente? Caso Open Stack³: Hosted in the Red Hat's offices in Buenos Aires, this talk was a very interesting one, on which I learned about the collaborative way of working of the Open Stack team, around the globe.
• (17 Nov 2016) Python Barcelona meetup.
• (9 Dec 2016) Barcelona Spark meetup⁴
• (22 Dec 2016) Python Barcelona December meetup⁵: I presented my talk about clean code in Python (yes, again :-), and there were two other interesting talks. Mine was the first one of the evening. The second talk, was about zc.buildout, an interesting tool for managing packages and environments in Python, which I first heard of at PyconAr (Python Argentina group) 2012. The third and last talk, presented a project named aiocache⁶: a cache system implemented in asyncio, that supports multiple back-ends. The talk walked us through the code, its architecture, and some use cases with demos.

Code wise

I started with a small contribution to the coala project⁷, and during the EuroPython sprints I contributed to aiohttp with a pull request.

There were two new releases of my vim configuration, versions v0.3 and v0.4⁸, which is great because is the single tool I use every day, and it is nice to have several improvements on it.

I also enhanced my dot files, but that is still in beta.

On general

A minor release of Python3.5, but most importantly: Python3.6 was recently released!

There were two releases of Fedora, 24 and 25, and there were lots of improvements and changes in the Linux Kernel.

Regarding information security, there were some issues in the Linux Kernel, also in applications (such as dirty COW, etc.), and a massive DDoS attack that stroke the Internet on October, due to IoT devices being compromised.

What to look forward to for the new year

• I still look forward for more contributions to open source, in particular with CPython.
• More functional programming (Scala/Haskell maybe), low-level programming in C, and research in the field of infosec.
• Keep on participating on technical conferences.

And a lot more.