Blog

I ran an updated version of our Essential Essential Scala workshop (E²S) at Hack the Tower.

E²S is a one-day crash course in Scala for programmers of all backgrounds. The content is based on our commercial Essential Scala course, which teaches as much about developing a functional programming mindset as it does writing Scala code. The slides and exercises are open source, and we’re happy to run regular free workshops to get new people into the Scala community.

Hack the Tower provided an excellent background and audience for the event. The view from the 27^th floor of the Heron Tower was simultaneously spectacular and terrifying – here’s a photograph as proof…

The Scala Exchange program is (mostly) up, meaning we can comment on the effectiveness of our diversity programme aimed at getting new speakers into the conference. (Note the program is also open to new attendees, so if you’d like assistance attending Scala Exchange just follow the link above and fill in the application form.)

All up we had 17 applications from people who wanted shepherding for a talk proposal. Of these 14 submitted a talk proposal, giving new speakers approximately 20% of all proposals. Of these 14 proposals, 9 have currently been selected to present (with a few more in a waitling list). This is a 64% success rate for new speakers in being selected, compared to 70% for other speakers, with new speakers making up 18.75% of all speaking slots.

There isn’t enough data to make strong statements about differences in acceptance rates between new and experienced speakers. The data does suggest the rates are in the same region, and we’re very happy with this result. Read on to find out how we did it.

I spent a few hours learning Shapeless and it made me $500.

At ScalaDays 2014, Originate ran a competition to implement a simple stack-oriented (aka concatenative) language. The competition hit all three points on my “interesting competition” scoring metric:

• the subject matter is intrinsically interesting to me;
• I thought I could implement a basic solution quite quickly; and
• there were clear avenues to expand the solution if I found time.

Functional Finance is a new event in London that Underscore are sponsoring.

The combination of functional programming and finance makes a lot of sense. The industries have the need for the best of concurrency, the expressiveness of DSLs, and the productivity gains. Functional gives you this.

The big news in Scala at the moment is the announcement of the Typelevel fork of Scala.

We’re delighted. There’ll be more emphasis on typed functional programming styles, which brings benefit to projects.