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The festive season is fast approaching and we’re rushing to pack the Underscore sledge with awesome presents for all the nice Scala developers out there. In this newsletter we have discounts and previews for Scala Exchange, discounts for our upcoming Advanced Scala course, some exciting news about the Advanced Scala book, and an adventure into the world of audio production.

Are you as intrigued I? Read on, dear friend, read on…

Hi,

Greetings from Copenhagen on the eve of Scala Days. In this newsletter I have a few things to talk about… conference talks, training, type tetris, and—oh—making all of our books free and open source.

Hi,

At the end of last year we ran a Christmas sale to raise money for charity. In this edition we have the results of that sale, and also the details of three events we’re running in the upcoming months, in LA and Seattle.

Hi,

It’s the Underscore newsletter! It has be a long time since the last one—for which I apologise—but now is not the time to dwell on the past. In this edition we’re letting you know about printed copies of our Guide to Shapeless and a hefty discount on our ebooks, in addition to the usual rundown of goings on. Also note that from now until 2017 we’re donating all income from book sales to charity.

Hi,

It’s almost Christmas! If I’ve learned one thing about the true meaning of Christmas from my children, it’s that it’s about loot—preferrably big piles of it—and the anticipation of said loot. If you feel similarly, and are hoping for something Scala themed under the tree, you might want to pass this newsletter on to your significant other and skip the italicized paragraph below. If you are the significant other (or want to treat yourself at Christmas, which I’m not ashamed to admit I do) read on!

Hi everyone,

It’s December, which means Christmas holidays are approaching for most of us, and—for a lucky few—so is Scala Exchange. In this newsletter we have a rundown of what’s happening at Scala Exchange, as well as news on Essential Slick, and the usual blog and job postings.

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since the last newsletter. I made the mistake of moving house and, well, some two months later I’m still surrounded by boxes and just getting on top of my backlog of work. But no matter, I have returned to the writer’s desk and we’re back with news of our books (including a new little discount just for you), training courses, and more. Read on!

Hi everyone,

We’ve had a heatwave in London this week with highs of over 30 Celsius (unusually toasty for the rainy UK). To celebrate, let’s pull out our deckchairs, place our knotted handkerchiefs on our heads, and dive into the latest news from the Underscore Newsletter.

This month we’re focusing on conferences: Scala Exchange is just around the corner, the videos from Scala Days are out, and we’re doing some advanced Scala training at Scala World. Plus some blog posts about cats and robots… this is the internet, after all!

Hi,

It’s time for cough May’s cough newsletter, and the theme of this edition is database access.

Since the last newsletter went out we have published a new book, Essential Slick. As most of you will know, Slick is a Scala library for relational database access. Essential Slick covers version 2.1 of the library. The next version, 3.0, was announced shortly before the book was published so we’re currently offering 50% off with the code slick2. This discount won’t last forever, so if you don’t have a copy of Essential Slick you might want to take advantage of this now.

But before we talk about databases, let’s touch on another subject that’s of great interest to many: money.

Hi,

There’s just time to squeeze in April’s newsletter before the month is over. In this edition we discuss the free monad and let you know about some free events running at Scala Days Amsterdam.

Our mini-series on error handling last newsletter had a great reception. We decided to repeat the idea, this time focusing on a more advanced topic: the free monad.

The free monad is one of those functional programming tools that from the outside seems both incredibly powerful (see Facebook’s Haxl and Twitter’s Stich for compelling applications) and incredibly unapproachable (if “left adjoint to a forgetful functor” means anything to you, I suggest you don’t need a tutorial on the free monad).

What we’ve tried to do is break down the free monad to its essential elements, and show that when you remove the jargon there are just a few simple concepts involved.

Hi,

Let’s talk about when things go wrong. It, inevitably, happens and every program needs an error handling strategy. The right strategy depends on the context – a throwaway script might not even need to handle errors – but the tasks for which Scala is typically used demand a robust approach.

In our code reviews we often see ad-hoc approaches to error handling that rely too much on people remembering to do the right thing. Last month we ran a mini-series on this topic on the blog, presenting some intermediate-level techniques that you can apply to make your code more robust.

Noel here with the first Underscore newsletter of 2015. In this edition I want to focus on two big changes we’re making to our training courses.

Hi,

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, which means at Underscore we’re all tearing about like over-excited six year olds. In fact we can’t wait another 19 days, so here is our Christmas present to you: a free preview of Essential Scala. Link only available to subscribers. Sorry! Essential Scala is a guide to producing robust and maintainable Scala code for developers new to Scala. We’ve been working on this book for the best part of a year, taking our training material and adding the extra depth that the written word affords us. We’re getting great feedback in our courses (like “this may be the best training course I’ve ever been on”) and we’re really excited about sharing our approach to learning Scala with a wider audience.

Noel here with the Underscore newsletter. Two main points this time: Scala Exchange, which you’ll want to attend if you can get to London in December, and some developments in our training courses, including our first public training courses in many months.

Last time we talked we were looking forward to Scala Days. Scala Days has been and gone now, and a rum time was had by all. If you couldn’t make it my writeup is online and all the talks are on Parleys. Here’s Dave’s excellent talk on macros and Miles and Jon’s humourous look back on Scala’s history.

It’s been a busy month for Underscore. We’ve seen a lot of different clients but one constant is that everyone has difficulty hiring. Scala is hot right now and demand outstrips supply. So how do you find Scala developers? I’ve put some together some thoughts on how to hire more effectively. Have some war stories or tips about hiring? Add them as comments to the post.

So, what’s in the newsletter? To begin with there is a summary of recent blogs posts and events from us, as well as details of upcoming events. I thought it would also be interesting to talk about some work in progress that isn’t at the state where we’d blog about it. So the second half of the newsletter has some discussion of the scalaz-stream project and Akka cluster. I hope you enjoy reading this! Do let me know what you like and what you don’t like. Replying to this email will go directly to me.