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!
Books
We have quite a few publications—five at last count—which are in various stages of completion. We have a regular stream of enquiries about these books so I wrote a little blog post giving the current status and future plans for each title. If you’ve bought one of our books and are wondering about future updates give it a read.
Now things move fast in the wild world of Underscore publishing, so there are two updates to that blog post:
- Advanced Scala has recently received an update on monad transformers; and
- Essential Slick chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 have been updated to Slick 3.
15% off Books for a Fortnight
To celebrate all this authorial output (which also includes Essential Scala coming out of pre-release; my first book that actually has readers) we have a discount just for newsletter readers. Use sorry, only for newsletter subscribers to get 15% off any of our books during the next two weeks. Enjoy!
Scala World and Scala Exchange
Scala World was last week. I wasn’t able to attend, but by all accounts it was an amazing conference and I will be eagerly waiting for the videos to go online. I did get to visit the location as we held a training course immediately afterwards and, although it was a touch inconvenient to access compared to the major cities, the journey was well worth it.
Scala Exchange is the next Scala conference in my calendar. I know the speaking slots were a lot more competitive than previous years, and the programme committee has put together what looks to be a really interesting line up. There are a few experiments as well this year: lightning talks (15 minute slots) and two hour tutorials. I will be delivering one of the latter, diving into the many ways of expressing the interpreter pattern in Scala, and Dave will be delivering two hours on Slick.
20% off Advanced Scala at Scala Exchange
The two days immediately before Scala Exchange will see us teaching Advanced Scala. Tickets are currently discounted 20%. This is our most popular training course so I recommend you grab a ticket quickly if you want to go.
Advanced Scala is aimed at the senior developer or team lead who wants to build large scale systems in Scala. The core idea of the course is that we can take a few key abstractions and apply them in a multitude of ways to build systems that go together like Lego. We have plenty of case studies to illustrate this. Advanced Scala is probably my favourite course to teach as we go into what is for me some of the most interesting and elegant abstractions in programming, and we show that these ideas are eminently practical and applicable to real world problems.
On the Blog
I haven’t done much blogging the last few months, but my colleague Richard has been producing a steady stream of posts on Slick:
- how to perform an upsert in Slick;
- how to integrate Slick and Shapeless; and
- Shapeless, Slick, and raw SQL together.
I did manage to squeeze in one blog post—a rumination on why simple isn’t the same thing as easy, inspired by finding my old vector calculus notes while packing.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
The Jobs Board continues to grow, and we now list four Scala specific positions that are open to junior developers, and a number of jobs that allow some component of remote work. Highlights includes:
- jobs at Net-a-porter in London and WorkDay in Dublin that are open to junior developers;
- a really interesting sounding data engineer job in Orange County, CA;
- working on the back-end of a new startup in Portland that is tackling diabetes; and
- a full stack developer job in Amsterdam.
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. Listing a job is completely free.
Final Thoughts
That’s it for this time. Hopefully the next newsletter will be a bit more timely. In the meantime we love hearing from readers. If you have something you want to discuss—perhaps something we can blog about, or maybe a job you want to list—get in touch.
Cheers,
Noel