An Introduction to Learning Scala

Okay, I haven't succeeded yet in convincing someone else to give a talk for the first meetup, and time is running short to prepare one, so I'll proceed with the backup plan of presenting myself…

Presentation / Workshop

This talk is called "An Introduction to Learning Scala" because I want to share insights I've gained over a few years of using the language that I wish I had known when starting out. These might give you a fast track to understanding Scala as a newcomer.

It's not going to be a typical introduction to Scala basics, there are many available resources that teach that better than I can (I'll suggest some in the talk) and we can't hope to cover teaching much of the language in one evening.

I don't expect you to know Scala or another functional language already though (but if you know a little it should help, and if you know quite a bit I think you can still learn from the talk). You should have some programming experience however—this talk is not oriented toward total beginners to programming.

I will start with a brief presentation of why I feel Scala is interesting and worth learning, and then move on to some live demonstration in the Scala REPL which I encourage you to follow along with yourself. I'll send out a guide to what you should install if you wish to sometime before the event.

This is a functional programming group so I'll advocate FP features of Scala, but I won't focus especially strongly on the pure-functional sect of Scala usage (e.g. Cats & scalaz). This time, I'll emphasize the practicality of Scala's multi-paradigm nature with FP leanings, and how it's an effective "gateway drug" that led me to learn more "pure" FP languages.

Speaker

Ches Martin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chesmartin)
Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform @ Agoda

Long-time contract engineer for a bunch of startups you've never heard of, I've recently joined Agoda where I work on the Experiments Platform, an in-house A/B testing & analytics system processing practically all traffic on agoda.com and built primarily in Scala.

A resident of Bangkok for many years now, I also co-organize the BKK/hack meetup (https://www.meetup.com/bkkhack/) of hands-on monthly hack nights.