2020 - what a weird year: enormous fires, elections, black lives matter protests, COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic-related economic crisis.

But 2020 is over, 2021 finally here and everybody is hoping for generel betterment. Anyway, I am thrilled and saddened at the same time. Saddened, because starting with 2021, after more than 6 years, I left my friends and colleagues at AVL. It’s been a pleasure working with you. Thrilled, because starting January 2021 I returned to the area of data analytics. I joined Invenium Data Insights as a software engineer. I left Dotnet Core and C++ behind me, and am now diving deep into Go and Kotlin. New job, new exciting and modern techstack.

From my first look at Kotlin I can already see that some of the best extensions from newer C# and dotnet core or even modern C++ are already central parts of Kotlin. E.g. the way Kotlin uses collections and extensions does look familiar if you are an experienced user of C++’s (and STL’s) newer features, especially with std::algorithm and containers. Lots of modern, safe and convenient approaches, lots of best practices incorporated into the language itself - while still being able to talk to tons of existing code from good old Java without much hassle. I was never a fan of Java. Kotlin however is a completely different chapter. Still, I am already missing LINQ, and various other quality-of-life improvements from dotnet core. Ktor is nice and all, but it still feels like there is tons of stuff missing. Auto-generated swagger files or api versioning, for example. Dependency injection is an external piece and feels out-of-place in contrast to dotnet core. Well… I’ll get used to it.

Furthermore I am going to dive into GoLang and Rust, which I am also very thrilled about. After so many years of focussing on only two languages, I really appreciate the fresh wind.