Scalatron!

Scalatron is an open source project from 2012 that had the goal of making the often tedious process of learning Scala more fun by turning it into a game. In Scalatron, your goal is to build a bot that collects energy on a randomized game board. You can collect energy by running into certain objects on the board - but watch out for enemy players and beasts! To make it more fun, Scalatron lets you spawn slave bots as well, so strategies very quickly grow in complexity.

While Scala has evolved somewhat in the last four years, learning it is still no easy task, and it's made harder by the shift from imperative to functional programming that most students need to go through. In this talk, Matt will present the work he did to bring Scalatron back to life at Jornaya, revamping the server to run with the latest versions of Scala, the JVM, and the libraries used, and building out a much stronger functional interface for the bots themselves.

For those interested, check out the bot framework at https://github.com/grandivory/scalatron-bot ! For the most up-to-date server to test against, use https://github.com/tlasica/scalatron .At the end of the talk, we'll pit everyone's bots against each other to see who comes out the winner!

Speaker: Matt Butt

Matt Butt is the technical lead at Jornaya (formerly LeadiD), and a Scala enthusiast. At Jornaya, he helps to build systems that process close to 150 million events per day, mostly collected via Javascript He's been working in Scala for the last two years, starting with a rewrite of the system used to query transactional data at Jornaya, and slowly building out his knowledge of functional programming during that time. Matt has a strong drive to help others understand the concepts he himself is still getting a handle on.