Scala Meetup: Pure FP Testing & Scala Toolchain with Pavel Shirshov and Kai

Join us at the Evolution office for the Scala Meetup featuring guest speakers Pavel Shirshov and Kai. They will be delivering two insightful talks aimed at addressing current challenges in the Scala ecosystem.

Talk 1: Hyperpragmatic Pure FP Testing With Distage-Testkit

Having a proper test suite can turn ongoing application maintenance and development into pure joy – the best tests check meaningful properties, not the implementation details, and hold no impliict assumptions about their test environment - every test case must be self-contained and portable. To ensure that tests are free of implementation details and environment dependency, we may simply run them in a different test environment, with different implementations of components. But the boileplate and manual work involved in rewiring components, writing hardcoded fixtures and setting up different test environments make this very hard to do at scale.

To tackle this problem we’ve created distage & distage-testkit, distage-testkit gives you the following superpowers:

• ability to easily swap out individual components or entire test environments
• principled & leak-free control of global resources for integration testing – docker containers, DBs, DDLs
• execute effects or allocate resources per-test, e.g. generate random fixtures per-test
• first-class testing of functional effects
• write tests as lambdas – access test fixtures via parameters or ZIO Environment

…and more! We’ll also discuss general testing practices and what really distinguishes good tests from great tests.

Talk 2: Grandmaster: Multi-Modal Heterogeneous Build Tool For Scala

We need a better toolchain for Scala. There are numerous complaints about developer experience and calls for change. At Septimal Mind we are working on Grandmaster, a heterogeneous multi-modal build tool which combines ideas and design elements of DIStage, Nix Package Manager and Gentoo Portage. In this talk, we are going to discuss the ideas behind Grandmaster and collect feedback from the community.

Looking forward to seeing you there!