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.
Scala Exchange
There is a lot on during and around Scala Exchange.
We’re running a two-day Advanced Scala course immediately before Scala Exchange. You can get 15% off the remaining places using the code redacted.
On the Saturday immediately following Scala Exchange is the first Scala Exchange Hack Day. A number of open source projects will have representatives, and this will be a great chance to work on some code, meet other Scala developers, and have some fun.
Scala Exchange itself is experimenting with a different format to previous years: two-hour workshops and 15-minute lightning talks in addition to the usual 45-ish minute talks. Some of the program highlights for me include:
- “Inappropriate Applications for Scala”, covering a MP3 decoder and a Gameboy emulator both, incredibly, written in Scala. In fact every talk in that time slot looks great.
- Workshops! I’m giving a workshop (on patterns for interpreter implementation—think free monads and all that stuff) so I won’t be able to go to the other workshops, but they all look excellent.
- “Optimising Scala for fun and profit.” I haven’t had to do much performance optimisation in Scala, but it something that I’m interested in learning more about in case the need arises, and this is the first talk on the topic I will be able to attend.
Underscore will have a booth at Scala Exchange, which is a good place to head to if you’d like to talk to any of us. If want to guarantee you get to chat with someone in particular we are taking bookings—just email me if this is of interest.
Essential Slick
Richard and Jonathon (with assistance from Dave) have been putting a lot of work into Essential Slick of late. Not so long ago Essential Slick targeted Slick 2.1. The book has since been completely updated for Slick 3.0, and work is in progress to bring the book up to Slick 3.1.
We’re also beginning to get some reviews for the book, such as
I would like to say that you and Jonathan have done a great job. This book is the missing Slick documentation.
Let me say that it is extremely gratifying to hear from anyone who has taken the time to read the book. I know how much work has gone into this and our other books, and it’s great to hear from our readers, whether to let us know we’ve done a good job or to give suggestions for improvements. (If you have thoughts on any of our books just reply to this email and I’ll forward them on as appropriate.)
On the Blog
The blog has focusing on day-to-day Scala programming issues of late. Highlights include
- Richard’s video on using Atom with Scala (though let me note that Emacs is the greatest editor of all time);
- some tips and tricks for using SBT effectively; and
- a look into the semantics of late binding and overloading.
Jobs
No newsletter is complete without mentioning the new jobs on the job board.
ITV are looking for junior and senior Scala developers. The junior developer role has particularly impressed me with its strong emphasis on mentoring. I know some of the staff at ITV, and they are great people. If I was starting out in my career I would be applying for this role.
If you want to work with some very interesting technology, the social network MeWe is looking for a senior Scala developer.
Finally, SuperAwesome are looking for some help developing their kid-safe marketing platform. Knowing a bit about their code base, if you like your monads this could be the job for you.
It is completely free to list jobs on our board. If you’d like to so, just fill out the form linked at the bottom of the job board.
That is all for this edition. Hope to see you at Scala Exchange if you are attending. And if not, hopefully sometime in 2016 we’ll be in the same place!
Cheers,
Noel