ScalaSyd Reboot - Episode 1

Almost 3 years after the last ScalaSyd event, we're back in 2021!

2021 will be a year full of ScalaSyd events!
We’re planning to have an event every month, at the beginning of each month.

If you want to give a talk, you can:

• Create an issue with your proposal in our Github repo: https://github.com/scalasyd/scalasyd
• Contact Jules Ivanic either on Twitter (https://twitter.com/guizmaii) and/or by email at jules.ivanic@gmail.com (I’m faster to answer on Twitter!)

We’re interested in everything around Scala!
Don’t be shy!
Come talk to our friendly community about your discoveries, your work, or anything you’re passionate about! 🙂

-----
Start writing better Scala with ZIO-CONFIG
Afsal Thaj

Retrieving configuration parameters is probably the very first step in many applications that we write at our workplace. So, why not make that very first step of your scala application embrace Functional Programming?

The intention of the talk is not to sell a library called "zio-config", but to share some of the concepts and thought process behind Functional Programming in Scala.
The talk is going to be helpful for those who are aiming to write better programs by gaining fine-grained control over the behaviour of your application and improve its correctness. Yes, this is just the beginning of my initiative to motivate a large number of developers to start their deep-dive into Scala ecosystem!

Who is Afsal?

I am a Software Developer/Consultant for the last 4 years, at Simple Machines, a technology consultancy in Australia that always strive to develop high quality purely functional software.

Interests:
I believe in writing robust software that has a high positive impact on business. During recent years, I strongly felt my passion as to build frameworks and libraries with the help of functional programming constructs, and enjoy releasing it to production with zero bugs! With my personal time learning Haskell, I do enjoy the power of FP on the JVM through Scala.

Blogging and sharing knowledge:
I am active in blogging programming concepts in general, principles that we should follow, and you can find my latest blogs here: https://medium.com/@afsal.taj06 and​ Gists in https://gist.github.com/afsalthaj

Open​ source contributions:
I have got committed to various projects across different languages.

The latest project that I author and maintain is zio-config (https://github.com/zio/zio-config​), which unveils simplified version of advanced functional programming with Scala. I have also got a few other pet projects as you can see in my GitHub (such as a safe-string-interpolation to disallow meaningless logging in applications, which is not quite exciting but always my favourite).

-----
Monocle 3: a peek into the future
Julien Truffaut

Optics is a popular topic among library authors; they exist in at least four flavours in Scala: Monocle, Quicklens, Shapeless and Tofu. However, we rarely see optics in real-world codebases.
Why is that? Why are optics not popular in Scala?

In this talk, I plan to not only answer this question but also offer some solutions to the current problems with Monocle API.

This presentation is a longer, more in-depth version of the one I gave last year at Scale by the Bay.

Who is Julien?

I am a backend engineer with experience in companies of all sizes, ranging from start-ups to tech giants like Amazon. For the last 5 years, I have been running functional programming training workshops with great success. I focus my training on simple functional programming techniques that deliver value to companies. You can check my online course page for more details https://www.fp-tower.com/courses/foundations