Talks and Drinks with Haoyi Li

Hey Scala people!

Another treat for you! Haoyi kindly offered to come speak to us about Mill. Our second speaker Tim will tell about running latency-critical workloads on Akka.
This time Databricks is so kind to host us!

Schedule
17:00 Doors open with snacks for dinner.
17:30 From Reactive Streams, through Virtual Threads, to Flows
18:30 Running Hybrid Latency-Critical Scala Workloads: Akka, Cats and Loom
21:00 get Kicked out

Better Scala Builds with the Mill Build Tool
Haoyi Li
Mill is a Scala build tool that improves upon every aspect of the venerable SBT toolchain: more performant, easier to understand, and scalable to larger codebases. Unlike most build tools, Mill makes build configuration easy: easier to write, easier to navigate, and easier to understand. This talk will explore how Mill works, demonstrate its advantages over SBT in a live-coding setting, and dive into the novel techniques that a modern build tool uses to improve upon older build tools of years and decades past.

Running Hybrid Latency-Critical Scala Workloads: Akka, Cats and Loom
Tim Evdokimov
Managing latency-critical Scala workloads combining Akka and Cats Effect requires careful orchestration of concurrency models and executors. This talk reviews foundational concepts (threads, executors, runnables) and explains Akka's fit within scalable event-driven architectures. It compares Cats Effect's traditional executor (2.0) with the Tokio-like executor (3.0), addressing blocking contexts and unsafe operations. Demonstrations include integrating Akka with Cats runtimes, highlighting JDK 21/24’s Loom virtual threads and runtime optimizations.

Li Haoyi
He graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, since then has built core infrastructure for high-growth companies like Dropbox and Databricks, and has been a major contributor to the open source community. Author of the "com-lihaoyi" suite of OSS Scala projects, Haoyi has deep experience in Scala and the JVM and has professionally built distributed backend systems, programming languages, high-performance web applications, and much more.

Tim Evdokimov
He is a principal software engineer at Proxy Live Solutions. With 25+ years of total backend experience, he specialises in building scalable
event-driven soft real time systems for fintech, gaming and IoT. Author of Akka/Pekko Sensors observability libraries.