London Scala User Group

🎉 Come along to the London Scala Talks! 🎉
In this event you'll hear from Haoyi Li, Martin Durchov and Adam Deegan.

Agenda
6:00pm - 🥤 Doors open. Come along and grab a drink!
6:35pm - 🗣️ Introduction
6:40pm - 🗣️ Haoyi Li: Scripting on the JVM with Scala
7:20pm - 🍕 Intermission: Join us for some free food and drinks! Vegan, vegetarian options are provided. Let us know if you'd like something special - we'd be happy to accommodate.
7:50pm - 🗣️ Martin Durchov: ScalaMeta: Treating Scala code as data
8:10pm - 🗣️ Adam Deegan: Practical Java Interop for Scala Effect Systems
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 may have a live stream
Watch this space for more details.

🗣️ Haoyi Li: Scripting on the JVM with Scala
This talk will explore the use of Scala as a scripting language, replacing the Bash and Python scripts common throughout the industry.

⭐ Haoyi Li ⭐
Li Haoyi graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, and since then has been a major contributor to the open source community. His projects have over 10,000 stars on Github, and are downloaded over 20,000,000 times a month. Haoyi professionally built distributed backend systems, programming languages, high-performance web applications, and much more.

🗣️ Martin Durchov: ScalaMeta: Treating Scala code as data
Scala source code is usually something we write and hand off to the compiler. But what if we could parse it, inspect it, build it, and transform it all from regular Scala code? ScalaMeta is the metaprogramming library that makes this possible, and it underpins a lot of modern Scala tooling ecosystems: Scalafmt, Scalafix, and Metals are all built on it.

In this talk we'll look at what ScalaMeta is, how its AST models Scala programs, and the core operations it provides: parsing, quasiquotes, tree traversal and more. We'll then turn to how we use it at Quantexa, where it powers code generation for our clients. Along the way we'll cover practical patterns that make code generation manageable at scale, and the rough edges you should know about before adopting it yourself.

⭐ Martin Durchov ⭐
I graduated from UCL in 2019 with a MSci in Theoretic Physics and started work in TxOdds, a small company focused on ultra-fast data streaming and processing, where I first encountered Scala, working with Typelevel libraries. Since January 2025 I have been working at Quantexa in the team responsible for data ingestion and processing also relying heavily on the Scala functional libraries and ScalaMeta.

🗣️ Adam Deegan: Practical Java Interop for Scala Effect Systems
Interfacing with a highly autonomous Java library in a functional manner is difficult. In this talk we'll explore the ways in which we've approached this; issues we found along the way; and the trade-offs between purity and pragmatism when there's a runtime which isn't yours to control.

⭐ Adam Deegan ⭐
Adam Deegan graduated from the University of Bristol with a degree in Computer Science in 2021 and has worked at Quantexa ever since. He started off as a Data Engineer and moved into software engineering a couple of years ago, working on the addition of a case management capability. His first true programming love was making Minecraft mods.