Yifan Xing was the lucky winner of our competition to win a ticket to Scala Days Berlin. Yifan had a great time and we also managed to bump into her at the conference which was lovely, here is her experience of Scala Days 2018.
"ScalaDays is an amazing conference that has a mix of remarkable talks and fun events. Fortunately, I’ve had a chance to attend the conference, by courtesy of Signify. At the conference, I’ve learned a lot from many impressive talks, which I would like to share.
Martin Odersky’s and Adrian Moors’s Keynote was about the roadmap for Scala 3. Martin described Scala as a fusion of FP and OOP, a better Java and a worse Haskell for the JVM. There are three future development goals, including being pure without sacrificing simplicity and performance, meta programming safely, and cutting down on boilerplate for new idioms. Dotty will better realize Scala’s potentials by focusing on consistency, safety, ergonomics, and performance. I look forward to Scala 3! Talk slides can be found here.
In talk “A Tale of Two Monix Streams”, Alex Nedelcu introduced Monix, a Scala library for asynchronous programs. In Monix, Task is a data type for computing asynchronously and it is evaluated lazily. Observable, on the other hand, is a data type for “modeling and processing asynchronous and reactive streaming of events with non-blocking back-pressure”. The talk not only gave a tour of different Monix data types with examples, but also provided the future roadmap for the library. Talk slides can be found here.
Kelley Robinson, developer Evangelist at Twilio, gave a talk on “Analyzing Pwned Password with Spark”. In the talk, she introduced the data structures in Spark, including Resilient Distributed Dataset, DataFrames, and Datasets. She also gave a demo on how to use Spark to analyze pwned password. This talk is a good combination of big data and security. Talk slides can be found here.
At ScalaDays, I learned about many interesting libraries and as well as various ways of giving talks from many amazing speakers. I’ve met many outstanding developers at Ladies Lounge. It was a wonderful experience!"
This article was written by Yifan Xing.