Wow what an amazing Scala in the City anniversary!
We are so incredibly grateful to everyone who came along to celebrate A Year of Scala in the City, we wouldn’t have made it on this journey without all your support.
The Signify and Scala in the City team hope that the birthday meet-up fulfilled all your expectations and we were thrilled to have two such awesome speakers of Noel Welsh and Paweł Szulc, thanks to both of you for taking the time out for us.
Medidata you were incredible and welcoming hosts, we can honestly say what a cool company to work for. Also, another well done to our winner of the Scala Days 10 Years of Scala Anniversary conference, it will be an unmissable event and we can’t wait to see you there!
While we wait for the videos to be ready you can check out the slides from Noel’s and Pawel's talk below, don’t worry we won’t keep you waiting long.
Thank you again for all coming along and being part of going into the second year of Scala in the City, we hope to make you proud with the exciting plans we have upcoming in future meet-ups.
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.
Stay posted for the details on the next Scala in the City!