Thank you again to everyone for making the time out of their evening to come along to Medidata and celebrate A Year of Scala in the City with us.
We were really luck to get the opportunity to gain a sneaky inside look into the workings of Medidata engineering team and they are working on some amazing things.
Paweł Szulc and Noel Welsh kindly shared their Scala and programming knowledge with us and if you weren’t there then now is your chance to check out the content you missed below!
Noel Welsh - How to Teach Programming
A lot of us find ourselves teaching programming. Teaching is a distinct skill from programming, and just like programming we can do it badly and we can do it well. I've been teaching programming for nearly a decade, and in that time I've learned a few things that I'll share in this talk.
Lots of us try our hand at teaching programming. If you're a senior developer then teaching juniors is likely to be part of your job. If you're a parent you might try teaching your children. Maybe you'll volunteer for a project like ScalaBridge to teach programming to new programmers.
When it comes to teaching programming it is natural to fall back to the techniques used when we were taught. If your experience was anything like mine then there is a lot of room for improvement. People tend to fixate on the choice of language, but what is taught---the curriculum---and how it is taught---the pedagogy---it much more important. In this talk, I'll cover the what and the how, giving practical tips for small group and one-to-one teaching of Scala and other functional programming languages.
Paweł Szulc - Formal verification applied (with TLA+)
Formal methods (and formal verification) promise something that every programmer dreams about - an ability to deliver software that is proven not to fail. Despite them being heavily researched for the past few decades, they seem not to get enough traction. It might be that people are just simply scared of a little bit of math or it could be that even good techniques take time to surface to the mainstream. This talk is here to change that. To convince and encourage you that (at least) some techniques are easy to use and can potentially save you days or even weeks of later debugging.
Pawel will introduce Leslie Lamport's TLA+ - a formal specification tool with a model checker and proof system. The main objective is to see how formal specification can quickly discover issues deeply hidden in the corner cases of your design. You will gain a powerful tool that you will use in your daily routines. Working with TLA+ will also allow you to think more abstractly about your system. This is not a theoretical talk, this lecture begs you to "please try it at home" - you won't be disappointed.