Our Lambda World competition winner Kajetan Maliszewski has only recently started working with Scala during his Masters Degree, therefore, the chance to attend this Functional Programming conference was definitely a good one!
At Signify we love giving people the chance to help progress their career and conferences like Lambda World are a great opportunity to do this as there are so many amazing talks to hear and inspiring people to meet. Check out Kajetan's review below.
'Thanks to Signify Technology I had a chance to go to the Lambda World conference last week. I’m into functional programming since I started working with Scala last year and I am currently pursuing a Masters in Madrid, so it was a great opportunity to meet with people from the industry, check out the current trends in FP, and escape for a while the intensity of Madrid. The conference was located in Cadiz, in a beautiful venue, a former tobacco factory.
The first day of the conference was focused workshops. Unfortunately, I arrived only for the last half an hour of the first session “Build Your Own Monads”, but after the talk I heard very good opinions from people who had a chance to attend the whole session.
Next was “Blockchain Application based on Scala. Use Case”. The session was very promising but some problems with presentation occurred and delayed the session significantly. The presenters eventually took off, however, they started describing the fundamentals of Ethereum, a concept that has already been presented around the World and is available all around the Web. I decided to switch to a session about Coq, a theorem prover. The session was slightly complex if one hasn’t used it before but I found it interesting and the presenter well-prepared.
Probably, the biggest surprise of the day was the “Dueling Keyboards” talk. Chris Ford shared with us his passion for music and how he combines it with programming. This time, it was more music theory than computer science, but that made this talk very refreshing and interesting.
The other day, I enjoyed the talk about the Screencast Video Editor in Haskell. Oskar Wickstrom is a Haskell blogger and is doing a lot of screencasts. He wasn’t satisfied with any existing (and cheap) solution so he decided to write his own tool - Komposition. Very inspiring approach and very impressive self-determination!
One of the things that amazed me the most was the mixture of talks throughout the conference. You could really feel that the organizers tried to schedule people with very different backgrounds – senior and junior developers, students, self-learners, researchers, and people from the industry.
As always, the best part of the conference was meeting people in the corridors, during the coffee breaks, and in the zone with company stands. Probably, thanks to the great weather of South Spain, people were very open and talkative!
Last but not least, the Closing Party was really fun. Great rock band, local food trucks, and beer was exactly what everyone needed!'
This article was written by Kajetan Maliszewski exclusively for Signify Technology.