EigenFaces and Success Stories: A Valentine's Meetup

Hey Scala Members!

We've got a new Meetup on Feb 12th, 6pm at Hootsuite Headquarters to look at the implementation of EigenFaces in Scala. EigenFaces are a quick way to perform facial detection using Eigenvectors by turning an image into a pixel matrix. Since it's been a slow start to the year, I'll be sharing this implementation to help us kick off 2015.

Update: 3 Tier Logic has also reached out and will be sponsoring beer and wine refreshments. Thank you!

In our effort to make the Meetups more open forum/unconference we'd like to open up a couple 15min slots for everyone to bring their topics to share. These topics can be anything from a Scala feature to a "question" of how to do something. A couple of you have approached me already with great ideas!

Finally, we'll be hearing about a Success Story in Akka/Ning from Yanik Berube. Yanik from Hootsuite will be sharing his story of how a switch to Scala helped solve a large-scale RSS feed problem. Here's a summary:

Hootsuite issues millions of requests to social networks on behalf of its users on a daily basis. These requests incur network latency costs which can accumulate rapidly and affect user experience and operations in general. This talk will review the modernization of Hootsuite's infrastructure for automated publishing via RSS/Atom feeds and how Scala, Akka, and Ning's asynchronous HTTP client were combined to effectively handle network latency. It will explore the motivations behind this effort, the approaches used, the benefits, and the lessons learned from developing and deploying this reactive service.

Please bring a topic or two for the open forum! I look forward to seeing all of you on Feb 12th.

• Justin