Scala Winter Meetup @ Spotify

Welcome to an evening full of Scala goodness, hosted by Spotify!

Don't miss this opportunity to hang out with fellow Scala developers, listen to interesting talks and network with the Scala community. Note that this event is run by Func Prog Sweden instead of Scala Stockholm, as part of an attempt to consolidate the two groups.

Note that this event will not be live streamed!

Agenda

• 17:00: Doors open—snacks and drinks will be available
• 18:00: Talk #1: Scio—The Scala API for Apache Beam - Annica Ivert
• 18:30: Break
• 19:00: Talk #2: Simple and Safe Pickling of Closures in Scala 3 - Phillipp Haller
• 19:30: Mingle and food
• 20:00: Closing time

Talks

Talk #1: Scio—The Scala API for Apache Beam - Annica Ivert

This talk introduces Scio, Spotify’s Scala API for Apache Beam. The first part explores the motivation for using Scala, while the second part highlights Scio-specific algorithms, including sort-merge-bucket joins—widely used at Spotify—and the rollupAndCount algorithm mentioned above.

Annica Ivert has been a data engineer at Spotify for seven years, within Spotify’s financial engineering domain, where she has been building and optimizing large-scale data processing pipelines. During this time she has also made contributions to Scio, most notably by developing the rollupAndCount algorithm in the extra package.

Talk #2: Simple and Safe Pickling of Closures in Scala 3 - Phillipp Haller

This talk explores the challenges of serializing closures in parallel and distributed systems on the JVM. Naive approaches—such as Java’s built-in serialization—can lead to subtle bugs and runtime failures, while existing libraries have notable limitations. The talk introduces Spores3, a Scala 3 library that enables safe, predictable, and composable serialization of closures. By enforcing rigorous compile-time checks, Spores3 prevents common serialization errors and enables advanced use cases such as composing serialized functions. The session covers the design of Spores3, illustrates shortcomings of current approaches, and concludes with future directions and applications.

Philipp Haller is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His research focuses on programming languages, type systems, concurrency, and distributed systems. He is a core contributor to Scala and was part of the team awarded the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for Scala.

Food

Beverages and some light food will be served at the event; when you RSVP to the event you will be asked for allergies or food preferences.