With the release of JDK 8 M7 on June 13, 2013, the upcoming Java 8 release is now feature complete. Even though its final release is roughly 9 months from now, I wanted to give some of its new features a try. I believe Java v8 will be the most significant release since Java v5 with its support for closures via Project Lambda.
After taking the last few months off after leaving Twitter, I finally had the time to focus on my personal website. Built using a technology stack of Play Framework 2.1, Java, Scala, Lucene, MySQL, Nginx, Bootstrap, and Amazon EC2. Having worked in a primarily Ruby on Rails environment at Twitter the last 3 years, it was a breath of fresh air to work with the Play Framework. It does everything Rails is good at, but with the reliability, maturity, and scalability of Java.