Scala Days 2014 - Summary

ScalaDays 2014 is over. Three developers from SoftwareMill attended: me (@adamwarski), Piotr Buda (@piotrbuda) and Maciej Biłas (@maciejb). The conference was great in all three dimensions: the content, the organisation, and the in-between discussions.

There were three keynotes (one for each conference day). The topics were quite varied, and in fact only Martin Odersky’s keynote concerned Scala directly. The other two, by Erik Meijer and Chad Fowler were more general, which was in fact a nice twist in an otherwise Scala-only conference. All three keynotes were interesting and each in a different way.

As a teaser, Chad Fowler explained why legacy is good. Erik Meijer showed how to formally explain certain behaviour of try-finally which may seem weird at first. And Martin outlined what he believes are the simple parts of Scala.

The first day of the conference consisted actually of Martin’s keynote only, plus an after-party, which I must say is a very good idea. It provided a great intro to the conference, and a good opportunity to socialise and connect with other Scala developers.

I had the pleasure to present as well; I think my “No-framework dependency injection framework” talk went pretty well. There were no slides (only live-coding), but you can find the complete source code with some comments here: https://github.com/adamw/nodi-macwire-pres. Huge thanks to everybody who attended! I got some good feedback, and a list of new ideas for developing the MacWire library. Maybe even some contributors?

As for the other talks, there was a lot of choose from, and as always we have been faced with some tough decisions. The topics were very varied, as Scala-based software is being used in more and more use-cases. To give just a very short summary of a small selection of the topics:

• Nick Stanchenko presented a new macro-based library for making Android development much simpler
• Alexandar Prokopec talked about building a reactive 3D game engine using Scala
• Eugene Burmako showed a glimpse of Scala Meta, a much simplified successor of macros
• Scala.JS by Sebastien Doeraene got much leaner and can compile a lot of “advanced” Scala libraries
• Viktor Klang and Roland Kuhn gave an excellent intro to the Reative Streams initiative
• Mathias Doenitz talked about the new akka-http module, its roadmap and how it differs from Spray (hint: reactive streams are important)
• …and much more - just wait for the Parleys talks :)

By the way - while waiting for the recordings, take a moment and subscribe to Scala Times - we’ll be gathering news and presentations from ScalaDays as they appear.

It was also great to see a lot of developers from Poland attending the conference! Probably the good connections between Berlin and Polish cities played a role, but I think Poland may become a centre for Scala development. Everybody knows that polish developers are great, and that includes Scala :). And that’s what we are already doing at SoftwareMill: we have partnered with Typesafe, and we are successfully delivering projects using Scala.

Thanks to the whole ScalaDays team for the organisation effort and see you next year!