4th Scala Meetup

Dear Scala enthusiasts,

I am really happy to announce that our first meetup for 2015 will take place on the 4th of March.

In this meetup we will host two introductory presentations. The first presentation will introduce us to Apache Spark (https://spark.apache.org/), probably the hottest big data technology at the moment, and in the second presentation will go through the various ways to handle errors in Scala.

The Talks

Introduction to Apache Spark by Tasos Skarlatidis

Apache Spark is an open-source distributed computing platform that extends the MapReduce model, it is designed to make big data analysis faster and provides an elegant high-level API. This presentation is an introduction to the Apache Spark core platform, including an outline of its main characteristics and core API.

Bio: Anastasios Skarlatidis is a software engineer and research associate at the NCSR "Demokritos". He has Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Piraeus and his interests are Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Complex Event Processing. He is passionate about programming and open-source.

Error handling in Scala by Spiros Tzavellas (http://www.twitter.com/sptz45)

In this presentation we will explore the various ways to handle errors in Scala. We will talk about exceptions in Scala and when to use them. Then we will see various ways to handle errors that common in functional programming like Option, Either, Try, etc.

Bio: Spiros Tzavellas is a software engineer living in Athens Greece. He is interested in both functional and object oriented programming and he loves working with Scala.