This year was my first time on the scala days at Amsterdam. Two and a half days programm and sessions about scala. The conference was held from 8. to 10. June at Beurs van Berlage. In total there were over 800 participants from all over the world. This year Typesafe decided to start two conferences. The first one was from 16. to 18. march in San Francisco - also with over 800 participants. I’m looking forward to see when and where the next scala days will be held.
At scala days there where 52 sessions and 3 keynotes. The full program was recorded and will be available at parleys.com as soon as possible. So watch out at parleys for sessions you might have not be able to see.
My program at the scaladays is listed below:
Monday 8. June
- Keynote Martin Odersky - Scala, where it came from, where it’s going.
Tuesday 9. June
- Keynote Jonas Bonér — Life beyond the illusion of present.
- Project Galbama: Actors vs. Types (Roland Kuhn)
- Lamda Architecture with Spark Streaming, Kafka, Cassandra, Akka and Scala (Helena Edelson)
- Making your scala applications smaller and faster with the Dotty linker (Dmitry Petrashko)
- Options in Future and how to unsuck them (Eric Bakker)
- WatchDog: How PagerDuty uses Scala for end-to-end functional testing (Kenneth Rose)
- Scala needs YOU! (Dick Wall)
- Write once, deploy everywhere (Mepomuk Seiler)
Wednesday 10. June
- Keynote Adam Gibson — The Future of AI in Scala, and on the JVM
- Why Spark Is the Next Top (Compute) Model (Dean Wampler)
- A purely functional approach to building large applications (Noel Markham)
- Reactive Slick for Database Programming (Stefan Zeiger)
- Building your first REST API in less than 30 minutes (Thomas Meijers)
- Easy Scalability with Akka (Michael Nash)
- Scala Puzzlers: “In the Matrix, anything is possible!” (Andrew Phillips)
Here are some highlights that I would recommend:
I would recommend Martins and Jonas keynote. The one from Adam was not that interesting for me. Project Galbama was about typesafe actors in akka, which was a very interesting talk and I’m looking forward to build a project with typesafe actors. More on this could be found at at typesafe.com and at letitcrash.com. At letitcrash.com you can find a list, what’s in akka 2.4-M1.
The Lamda Architecture gives you an overview of what can be done with akka, cassandra, kafka and spark.
The dotty linker gains a lot of attraction, since this tool can shrink your compiled code, but it’s still experimental.
The talk about Options and Futures was about monads and monade transformers, from the scalaz library.
For all who would like to contribute I recommend Scala needs you from Dick Wall. It’s an overview with hints how to help best.
I definitely recommend the talk about why Spark ist the next top model from Dean Wampler.
Easy scalability with akka from Michael Nash gives you some more insights on akka and CQRS in combination with Event Sourcing (ES). We compares two implementations - one with CRUD style akka and one with CQRS and ES. The essence is, if you do it right, akka and CQRS with ES definitly beats the CRUD implementation.
Scala Puzzlers was a funny one and my last - if you think you know scala, then try out this one and see if you can master it ;-).