Before starting a holiday weekend, I like to have some go to new articles to read while I am waiting for things to complete, you know the holiday waits and long build times.

So here's some really interesting articles from all over, from Redis to Spark Scala to Go Language to Big Data.

• To keep in the holiday spirit, a Christmas tree implemented in Scala.

• Scala Tutorials Part #1 - Getting Started with Scala - Madusudanan

• Scala Tutorials Part #2 - Type Inference & types in Scala - Madusudanan

• Scala Refactoring for Fun and Profit

• Nothing says the holidays like Shell.

  • Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks

• You must check out some of the awesome tech advent calendars. This one is nice.  JIT Compiler, Inlining and Escape Analysis - Java Advent

• One of my favorite Christmas presents ever was a 64spec - Commodore 64 Testing Framework  and now you can program in it with testing.

• Go Go Go!

  • It's a different world when the NY Times has cool Go Libraries. Introducing Gizmo - The New York Times

• Sweet!  I want to write modern Javascript, but I still like Java.  

  • Now you don't have to decide. Examples: how to use JSweet to write small Web programs. With examples, AngularJS, documentation and everything in github, how can you go wrong?

• Don't go here if you thought the math on calculating how much you bought in presents was hard. Spark for Financial calcs.

• My old employers at Pivotal put together a nice newsletter. The best holiday SSH article!?!??!

• One of my favorite databases is Redis, the people behind it are very cool and friendly, great community and a fun easy to use database for certain use cases. Well this is a cool use case!

The below picture is a rescued baby squirrel I was hand feeding. How is this picture related? To relate it woud require some really good analysis and some heavy processing. Otherwise it's as random a picture as could be.