My Experience at Scala Italy 2017
A sum-up of the conference, together with a list of suggested talks and some personal considerations
I recently attended the Scala Italy 2017 one-day conference in Rome, together with my coworkers at buildo. Having just started to learn Scala, I was excited to have the opportunity to get in touch with the Scala community and to attend talks by experienced developers in the field. Here are my thoughts about the conference!
First, let me highlight the fact that Gabriele Petronella, one of my colleagues at buildo, was one of the organizers of the conference, and that we are very proud of it.
Venue and Organization
First of all, the conference was held in the beautiful Rome. This is a picture that Francesco Negri took at sunset, the day before the event:
Did I say enough?
Speaking about the venue itself: the conference room was big enough and the talks were clearly visible and hearable from all the seats. Lunch and happy hour were held in a beautiful terrace on the rooftop of the hotel, which offered a very nice view.
The day was split in two: a single-track session in the morning and a double-track session in the afternoon, where the room was divided into two smaller rooms. I liked this format, and I would keep it as it is for the next year, even in the case of an upgrade to a two-days conference.
The food during lunch and coffee breaks was good, and there were also a lot of customized beverage cans containing a sparkling mango-flavoured drink.
The conference price was also fair: 100 euros (50 in early bird!). This kind of conferences are usually way more expensive.
Talks I (we) liked
Here’s a list of the talks that me and my colleagues liked the most:
Scala Is The Next Scala (Kevin Webber)
Having just started to approach Scala, I can say that I wasn’t completely sure about what to expect from it: I heard a lot of people say that “Scala is the new Java” or that “Scala just wants to try to substitute Java, but it will not succeed”. I am approaching it from a more functional-programming point of view, because that is the way in which we do it at buildo, and the best way to leverage its power in my opinion, and I think it simply should not be seen just as a successor of Java. This talk is about this “issue” of the perception and the objectives of Scala: it discusses the reasons why Scala will likely remain a specialized programming language, and why becoming The Next Java isn’t what the Scala community needs in order to continue fostering a vibrant community, culture, and ecosystem.
Compiling like a boss! (Mirco Dotta)
This is Gabriele Petronella’s favorite talk: the presentation of Hydra, a distributed Scala compiler. Being the presentation of a commercial tool, you’d expect it to be marketing-oriented; instead, it’s actually a great technical talk providing a lot of insights into how to identify bottlenecks in the compilation time, a well-known pain point of any non-trivial Scala application.
Adventures in Meta-Programming: Macros versus Shapeless (Dave Gurnell)
This is Giovanni Gonzaga’s suggestion: as a mostly front-end developer he had always been envious of, and also frightened from, the various ways in which it’s possible to do meta-programming in Scala. Dave’s presentation is very clear and provides practical examples of situations in which it makes sense to use macros and others in which Shapeless would be the best choice instead.
Practical Eff monad for micro-services (Eric Torreborre)
Claudio Caletti suggests you this: a pragmatic talk that shows how to take advantage of functional programming in Scala, in a real world scenario. It contains some good insights that could help us improving our development stack. Furthermore, we saw some similarity with what we already do: it seems that we are not the only ones that generate front-end clients starting from Scala interfaces — we do it using metarpheus, and we also wrote a blog post about it.
Summing-up
Summing up, I had a very good time at Scala Italy: I had a glimpse of the Scala community and had fun with my new colleagues — I just joined buildo :) — and overall I am very satisfied about how the day worked out.
I believe that conferences are a great opportunity to meet fellow developers and engineers and to get involved with the community: if you don’t usually attend conferences, just pick one that you like and go! If possible, go with your colleagues, so that it can become also a great team building opportunity.
At buildo, we strongly believe in what I just said: every member of the team has a budget that can be spent specifically for conferences and is encouraged to use it whenever there is the opportunity to do so. Whoever works at buildo is also encouraged to get involved in these events in a more practical way. In this case, Gabriele Petronella was also involved as one of the organizers of the conference itself while alessandra villa and Maristella Fioriello designed most of the visuals: we could get a glimpse of all the hard work that is behind an event like this. It feels good to work in a place where people are so enthusiastic about a technology that not only they attend conferences but they go the extra mile and put up one from scratch!
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