Buying into Scala from the Inside and Out

What

Getting to grips with a new programming language can be daunting, especially if it requires learning a new discipline such as functional programming. In this talk, Sofia and Dave will provide a step-by-step guide to adopting and mastering Scala from two different perspectives: the graduate developer and the visiting consultant.

Sofia Cole is a developer at YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP with eigtheen months’ experience working with Scala. Dave Gurnell is a consultant at Underscore with over a decade’s experience writing functional code. Between them, they will walk you through their experiences at YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP migrating from a legacy Perl monolith to a Scala microservice architecture.

Topics covered will include:

• How to sell Scala within your organization.
• What benefits do managers and developers care about?
• A step-by-step guide for navigating the sea of Scala and FP concepts, without losing yourself in a monadic storm
• Shared joys and pains from different developers from disparate backgrounds, and how to reconcile them
• The tactical and targeted use of hack days, and functional programming workshops, including a step-by-step guide for running coding dojos
• A guide to pair programming from two different perspectives: peer-pairing and teacher-student pairing

This will be an entertaining and enlightening alternative take on the Scala adoption story. The speakers absolutely promise not to quarrel on-stage (unless the situation particularly demands it).

Where and When

This talk will be given by Sofia Cole and Dave Gurnell at Scala Days Berlin in Berlin on 17 June 2016.