Error Handling and Tests in Scala

We will be airing this Meetup live via ReadyTalk and Google+. If you are to watch only one, I would suggest ReadyTalk because the desktop will be shared only on this platform.

ReadyTalkURL: http://www.readytalk.comAccess Code: 4384096

Google+ Hangouthttps://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/6f38151d008e7fe581f4ade0fe0081df591c548d?authuser=0&hl=en

With this meetup, we welcome two new Scala pillars to the community. Yuvi Masory, a new co-organizer, is a hot-off-the-press addition to the Bay Area from Philly, where he famously founded and had run the first Scalathon -- to be repeated in a very hands-on way on this coast soon! Yuvi will talk about error handling in Scala. The venue is provided by {rr} RichRelevance -- a company which makes personalized recommendations (pioneered at scale by Amazon) possible for users of any implementing companies. Rich Relevance has a new awesome space in the heart of SOMA which is perfect for more forthcoming meetups and hackathons. RR's very own Chad McDaniel will talk about testing RR stack with Scala as a way to bootstrap its adoption. The details of the talks follow.

Chad Urso McDaniel, RichRelevance
Introducing Scala into a Java oriented company

Chad is a principal software engineer at RichRelevance and has been an evangelist of many new tools and concepts including guice, google collections, scala, and others.

I thought that a Java functional system would work great in our code base. I started us using Google's Guava library and then thought going all the way with Scala would be even better. Fewer lines of code would be easier to read and less buggy. We also needed more test coverage in our code given the large scale and data driven products. The testing side of our code was a good place to learn Scala while focusing on functional correctness without worrying too much about performance or elegance!

Yuvi Masory
When things go wrong: error handling in Scala

Unless you're Chuck Norris, your programs will probably encounter errors, and your code may even be the source of some of them. In this talk I'll start with the basic building blocks such as try/catch, Option, and Either, and then plunge into some of the more advanced strategies for error tracking, accumulation, and control flow. Specifically, I'll cover Option/Either patterns, Lift's Box, Scalaz's Validation, ValidationNEL, and associated machinery (applicative functors, Kleisli arrows, type lambdas), and finally, the new scala.util.control.Exception abstractions.

Yuvi Masory is a Scala developer from Philadelphia brand new to the Bay Area. His interest center parallelism & distribution for the web. On the community side he organized Scalathon annually and hosts the Scala Types podcast.

Yuvi is also starting a new Scala-based meetup, the Bay Area Scalatra Users Group.
Their first meetup, "Perfect match: WebSockets and Akka, on Scalatra" is on the following day (1/30 -- see https://www.meetup.com/scalatra/events/98394932/ ):
WebSockets are rapidly gaining popularity as a way of enabling full-duplex high-performance communication over a single connection. While they may seem rather otherwordly compared to good ol' request-response HTTP, they can actually be seen as a subset of actors.

Yuvi will give an intro to WebSockets (via Atmosphere) and show how they tightly integrate with Akka by use of Scalatra's extensions. No prior knowledge of WebSockets, Akka, or Scalatra will be assumed.

The building has its own security so we will update the description with the specifics. For now, it is safe to sign up with your real name.