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Wojciech Pituła

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Scalar Conference 2017 Summary

On 7th & 8th of April I’ve been at the Scalar Conference, a great event in Warsaw. Here you can find summaries of the presentations with my, totally biased and probably wrong, comments.

I have used three metrics to rate the quality of the presentations:

  • Content - Measure of how good the presentation was from merit point of view.
  • Quality - Measure of how good the presentation was from technical point of view.
  • Relevancy - Measure of how relevant to me was the presentation. The best presentation has to be either general or very close to what I’m doing. Also the presentation should be slightly above our level of understanding the topic.

All the videos are avaiable here. At the end you can find links to interesting libraries/resources mentioned at the conference.

The best

These are the presentations that should be watched. All of them are very good, both in terms of the content and quality. I’ve tried to put them in order from the best.

1. GETTING MORE MILEAGE FROM YOUR MONADS WITH MTL - PAWEŁ SZULC

Great presentation about how we can avoid using monad transformers. Very pleasant to listen, maybe a little to fast(not enough time to present).

Content: 8 Quality: 9.5 Relevancy/Influence: 8

2. QUARK: A PURELY-FUNCTIONAL SCALA DSL FOR DATA PROCESSING & ANALYTICS - JOHN A. DE GOES

Very nice example of purely-functional programming. John presented Quark, which is DSL for creating data analysis flows similar to this available in Spark. I understood the examples but wouldn’t be able to reproduce the solution. Shows how we can use GADTs and Finally Tagless to create interpreted data structures.

Content: 9 Quality: 8 Relevancy/Influence: 8

3. FUNCTIONAL FOUNDATION OF EVENT SOURCED APPLICATION - RENATO CAVALCANTI

Event sourcing expressed as functions signatures. Introduction to Fun.CQRS library. Nice introduction to CQRS in general.

Content: 8 Quality: 8 Relevancy/Influence: 8

4. MODULARITY À LA ML - IONUȚ G. STAN

Very interesting presentation showing how Scala is inspired by Standard ML language.

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 8

5. LEARN YOU AKKA STREAMS FOR GREAT GOOD! - HEIKO SEEBERGER

Live coding demo of Akka Streams.

Content: 7 Quality: 8 Relevancy/Influence: 6

6. PRACTICAL MONAD TRANSFORMERS - GABRIELE PETRONELLA

Very nice introduction to monad transformers.

Content: 7 Quality: 6 Relevancy/Influence: 8

7. ADVENTURES IN META-PROGRAMMING - DAVE GURNELL

Good comparison between shapeless and macros for meta-programming.

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 7

The good

TYPECLASSES — A TYPE SYSTEM CONSTRUCT - ANDREA LATTUADA

Comparison of different approaches to typeclasses. At the end we can see how simulacrum can help us with encoding typeclasses in scala.

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 6

REAL-TIME ANOMALY DETECTION MADE EASY - PIOTR GUZIK

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 5

RANDOM DATA GENERATION WITH SCALACHECK - DANIELA SFREGOLA

What we can take from scalacheck to generate random data.

Content: 6 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 6

CASE STUDY FOR A REAL-WORLD TYPE-LEVEL PROGRAMMING - GEORGE LEONTIEV

Story of how type-level programming was applied in practice.

Content: 6 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 6

DESIGNING DATA STRUCTURES FOR THE TYPELEVEL ECOSYSTEM - RÜDIGER KLAEHN

Presentation on how to create good, specialized data structure.

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 5

HOW TO EXTEND MAP? … OR WHY WE NEED COLLECTIONS REDESIGN? - SZYMON MATEJCZYK

Good show of how bad is current scala collection library.

Content: 8 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 6

GATLING DISTILLED - ANDRZEJ LUDWIKOWSKI

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy: 6

CARPENTERS AND CARTOGRAPHERS - VALENTIN KASAS

Very interesting presentation about vocabulary, but not very useful. Nice to listen.

Content: 8 Quality: 6 Relevancy/Influence: 5

LAMBDA CORE – HARDCORE - JAROSŁAW RATAJSKI

Very, very fast show of lambda calculus.

Content: 8 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 6

KONTEXTFREI: A NEW APPROACH TO TESTABLE SPARK APPLICATIONS - DANIEL WESTHEIDE

Presentation of the Kontextfrei, which is the library for testing Spark applications. Library looks nice but currently it supports only Rdd abstraction.

Content: 7 Quality: 5 Relevancy/Influence: 7

The other

CONSCIOUS CONSISTENCY WITH AKKA CLUSTER, CRDTS AND DISTRIBUTED DATA - JAN PUSTELNIK

Talk about distributed data structures. Great knowledge with many potential use-cases in libraries handling distributed data, but kept on very academical level. It is in this section because to be useful for me it should contain less theory and more business use-cases.

Content: 8 Quality: 4 Relevancy/Influence: 4

AKKA CLUSTER MANAGEMENT AND SPLIT BRAIN RESOLUTION - NIKO WILL

A lot of valuable knowledge for people working with highly distributed Akka clusters.

Content: 7 Quality: 4 Relevancy/Influence: 4

TRACING AKKA STREAMS - RAAM ROSH HAI

The presentation was read from the screen, so I cant even say what it was about.

Content: 6 Quality: 2 Relevancy/Influence: 4

BUILDING A REAL-TIME AUCTION ENGINE USING EVENT SOURCING - ALAN JOHNSON

Nice presentation, but I’m not fan of this type of presentations(analyzing concrete cases).

Content: 6 Quality: 7 Relevancy/Influence: 4

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS IN AKKA - MACIEJ GORYWODA

Content: 6 Quality: 6 Relevancy/Influence: 5

TAKING YOUR SIDE-EFFECTS ASIDE - TOMASZ KOGUT

Content: 7 Quality: 7 Relevancy: 6

CONTINUOUS APPLICATIONS WITH SPARK 2.0 - KAMIL OWCZAREK

Walk through structured streaming introduced in Spark 2.0.

Content: 6 Quality: 6 Relevancy: 6

Things to take home

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