Scala Talks x Imperial: A Life in Scala & Designing with Duality

Details
🎉 Come along to the London Scala Talks in collaboration with Imperial DoCSoc! 🎉
In this event, you'll hear from Rory Graves and Noel Welsh.
Agenda
6:00pm - 🥤 Doors open. Come along and grab a drink!
6:40pm - 🗣️ Rory Graves: A Life in Scala
7:20pm - 🍕 Intermission: Join us for some free food and drinks! Vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options are provided. Let us know if you'd like something special - we'd be happy to accommodate.
7:50pm - 🗣️ Noel Welsh: Designing with Duality
8:30pm - 🥤 Socialising: Grab a drink and let's discuss the talks.
9:00pm - 🍻 Join us in a pub to discuss the talks!

🌐 This event has a live stream. Join it here at 6:40PM

🗣️Rory Graves: A Life in Scala
Software development is full of competing demands—speed, reliability, scalability, flexibility, and affordability. Everyone wants all of them, and they want them now. But building software that delivers on all these fronts is much harder than it seems.
Having used Scala as his primary language since 2010 and being deeply involved in its community, Rory has seen how different programming paradigms, tools, and mental models shape software development. This talk will explore key lessons from his career—how to think about software and software careers, the trade-offs of different paradigms and abstraction levels, and why for him Scala hits the sweet spot for building robust, scalable systems easily. Along the way, we will discuss real-world insights on tools, best practices, and how to navigate the ever-changing landscape of software engineering.
Whether you’re considering Scala for your future projects or simply thinking about the next steps in your career, this talk will give you perspectives that go beyond the code.
⭐ Speaker ⭐
Rory has been passionate about coding for as long as he can remember—starting with writing games in BASIC far too many years ago. Over a 30+ year career, he has worked across a vast range of systems, from embedded systems to distributed internet-scale bidding engines. His experience spans industries, company sizes (from two-person startups to multinational corporations), and programming paradigms.
A long-time advocate of Scala, Rory has contributed to numerous open-source projects, including performance optimizations in the Scala compiler. Today, he works in a hybrid role supporting applied AI and ML research while continuing to mentor developers and share knowledge through public speaking.
Outside of software, Rory is a martial artist, a windmill tour guide, and a passionate mentor of programming and public speaking.

🗣️ Noel Welsh: Designing with Duality
How can we systematically design software? One way is to use dualities, which allows us to connect implementation techniques, such as FP and OO (otherwise known as data and codata), as different instantiations of the same underlying model. In this talk, we'll explore duality as a design strategy for interpreters, and show that four different approaches to writing an interpreter inner loop fall out as applications of duality. This allows us to pick the implementation that best suits our needs, and makes creating software less a matter of inspiration and more the application of a consistent and repeatable process.
⭐ Speaker ⭐
Noel is developer, mentor, and trainer who works with leading companies in the UK and USA. He fell in love with functional programming when he discovered PLT Scheme (now Racket) shortly after graduation, and the majority of his work since has involved functional programming and, more recently, Scala.
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