I have a very narrow set of skills, which can be summarized as “delving into a language and helping others understand and (sometimes) solve problems involving that language.” That’s too simple, however – because I ultimately seek “the best” language, for my own personal definition of “best.” I also leave languages behind. While I once knew all the ins and outs of C++, for example, I stopped studying that language after C++98, searching for a language that gave me more.

I will be giving the opening keynote at the JET conference in Minsk, Belarus on September 28. The title is “A Language is More Than a Language,” about the necessity for everything that surrounds a programming language. You can find the description here. An interview with me on Opensource.com. The creator of the Elm language about language design philosophy. This makes me want to learn Elm. Kent Beck gives an amazing closing keynote.

When Linus Torvalds started creating Linux, he managed the code base himself. People would email him patches and he would either include them or not. To maintain the code base – to have checkpoints and be able to back up to an earlier known point – he used a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) which, as the name implies, is for managing versions. So there were these two seemingly-separate things: incorporating patches and managing versions.

Pycon is a community-organized conference, and if it’s not already there it’s steadily evolving towards a Teal organization (what I’ve started calling a Trust Organization). It’s not controlled from the top, so lots of people make great things happen. One example I discovered at this conference: some 50 (I think) students are fully sponsored to come to the conference. When you speak at Pycon, you still pay all your expenses and your entrance fee.

While at the Python Conference in Montreal in April, I gave a presentation at VuWall titled The Next Big Challenge: Getting Better Ideas. Here’s the video.

The changes to the second edition include a large number of fixes to the exercises and solutions, corrections from bug reports, and any updates necessary for Scala version 2.11. Some examples are replaced or improved, and much of the book’s prose is improved. If you bought the first edition eBook, you automatically get an update to the second edition. Unfortunately, the number of changes to the first edition print book are just too comprehensive to summarize in a document.