Talks and drinks: Akka Typed and Scala Infer

Dear members! Happy New Year and best wishes!

And as promised here is our new meetup. This time both talks are about Scala, which is a pure coincident and doesn't mean at all that we loose our multi-lingual focus. Quite contrary, I'd be very much interested in a borrel discussion about alternatives to solving the same problems in different languages. See you soon!

18:00: Doors open

18:30: Workshop: Migration to Akka Typed. – Ivan Stanislavciuc

19:20: Break

19:30: Scala Infer - typesafe probabilistic programming. – Frank van Lankvelt

20:30: Borrel and socializing

Workshop: Migration to Akka Typed

Ivan is an experienced developer, architect and tech lead, whom I had pleasure working with. He'll tell us what kind of challenges one faces when moving from Akka to Akka typed. The talk is made in a workshop style without slides but just some live coding in an IDE.

Scala Infer - typesafe probabilistic programming

Probabilistic programming is Bayesian inference for programmers. Write a program that describes the data generation process and let an inference engine take care of fitting it to the actual data.
It turns out that this can be achieved with the addition of a few keywords to the language. Scala-infer leverages meta-programming in Scala to implement the keywords and hooks them up with fast, approximate, inference.

Frank will provide a gentle introduction to probabilistic programming, along with the technology (macros, reverse auto-diff) we need to implement the abstraction.

The full project is available at https://github.com/fvlankvelt/scala-infer