Scala Exchange 2017

I have visited Scala Exchange („#ScalaX“) in London on 2017-12-14 and 2017-12-15. It was great, better than 2015 in my opinion. In 2016 I missed Scala Exchange in favor of Clojure Exchange.

This time there were really many talks about category theory and of course its application to Scala. Spark, Big Data and Slick were less heavily covered this time. Lightbend (former Typesafe), the company behind Scala, did show some presence, but less than in other years. But 800 attendees are a number by itself and some talks about category theory were really great.

While I have always had a hard time accepting why we need this „Über-Mathematics“ like category theory for such a finite task as programming, I start seeing its point and usefulness. While functors and categories provide a meta layer that is actually accessible in Scala there are actually quite rich theories that can even be useful when constrained to a less infinite universe. This helps understanding things in Java. I will leave details to another post. Or forget about it until we have the next Scala conference.

So the talks that I visited were:

• Keynote: The Maths Behind Types [Bartosz Milewski]
• Free Monad or Tagless Final? How Not to Commit to a Monad Too Early [Adam Warski]
• A Pragmatic Introduction to Category Theory [Daniela Sfregola]
• Keynote: Architectural patterns in Building Modular Domain Models [Debasish Ghosh]
• Automatic Parallelisation and Batching of Scala Code [James Belsey and Gjeta Gjyshinca]
• The Path to Generic Endpoints Using Shapeless [Maria-Livia Chiorean]
• Lightning talk – Optic Algebras: Beyond Immutable Data Structures [Jesus Lopez Gonzalez]
• Lightning Talk – Exploring Phantom Types: Compile-Time Checking of Resource Patterns [Joey Capper]
• Lightning Talk – Leave Jala Behind: Better Exception Handling in Just 15 Mins [Netta Doron]
• Keynote: The Magic Behind Spark [Holden Karau]
• A Practical Introduction to Reactive Streams with Monix [Jacek Kunicki]
• Building Scalable, Back Pressured Services with Akka [Christopher Batey]
• Deep Learning data pipeline with TensorFlow, Apache Beam and Scio [Vincent Van Steenbergen]
• Serialization Protocols in Scala: a Shootout [Christian Uhl]
• Don’t Call Me Frontend Framework! A Quick Ride on Akka.Js [Andrea Peruffo]
• Keynote: Composing Programs [Rúnar Bjarnason]