Newsletter 10: Conferences, Cats, and Robots from the Future

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!

Scala Exchange

First things first, Scala Exchange is happening in London on 10th and 11th December. We are proud to be part of the programme committee again for 2015.

Submit Your Talk Now!

The Call for Papers is open now. Scalax is the largest annual Scala conference in Europe, so it’s a great platform to speak about your experiences with Scala. Promote your Scala project, talk about your experiences with Scala, help people to learn something new, or use it as an excuse to learn new things. Accepted speakers also get an free extra ticket for a guest.

Submissions close at the end of the month. Don’t delay – submit your abstract now!

New Speaker? We Can Help!

If you’re new to speaking or don’t know what to talk about, we can help. Our hugely successful New Speakers Programme returns this year to help increase the diversity of the Scala speaker community. Simply get in touch via our contact page or by checking the box on the CfP form, and we’ll help you with everything from writing your abstract to planning your talk. We also have bursaries to help some speakers.

Speakers from our New Speakers Programme gave some of the highest rated talks at Scala Exchange last year. This is a perfect opportunity to launch your Scala speaking career in a supportive, friendly environment.

Preparing a good talk takes time. Contact us now to give us as much time as possible to help.

Scala World

Scala World is coming. Our very own Noel Welsh is running an extended two-day version of his excellent Advanced Scala with Scalaz course immediately following the conference. The course is co-located at the Scala World venue, making it a great and convenient way to get to grips with advanced Scala techniques.

Scala Days Amsterdam

The videos from Scala Days Amsterdam are up. You can see each of our presentations online along-side great talks from the Scala community:

One particular highlight for me was Amanda Laucher’s talk on Types vs Tests – a fascinating talk from a great speaker. Definitely check it out!

On the Blog

Noel crushed it again this month with some excellent posts on the blog:

Keeping Scala Simple

His post on Keeping Scala Simple generated a lot of discussion on how to write clean, maintainable code that is accessible to new developers. Check the the comments on the post and the thread on Linkedin for some great community viewpoints.

An Introduction to Cats

Noel also wrote about Cats, the upcoming functional programming library and spiritual successor to Scalaz. Cats aims to provide a more modern, modular codebase than its predecessor. Plus points such as a strong emphasis on documentation and sympathy with newer Scala technologies such as ScalaJS make this library a must watch.

Annihilators in Scala

Finally, Noel wrote a post on annihilators. These aren’t robots from the future, as you might expect, but a great example of functional library design using type classes.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

The Jobs Board has had a great start. We’ve gone from one to ten posts in just over a month, including two junior positions and one that is remote-friendly:

Head on over if you’re looking for a new position, and get in touch if you’d like to list a job on the board.

Final Thoughts

That’s all for June’s newsletter. As ever, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the content we’re putting out. Are there particular themes you’d like to read about here? Get in touch by replying to this email!

Cheers,
Dave


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