A Healthy Diet of Scala

Abstract: Scala from the Trenches

In this live coding session in Scala, Kfir Bloch (head of back-end engineering at Wix) will showcase how to build a full-blown feature in Scala, while maintaining the principles of TDD and Clean Code. We'll start with some simple scaffolding and build the feature in its entirety: defining the user-facing API, writing tests outside-in with all of the requisite building blocks (collaborators and matchers), development-refactoring cycles and ending up with a clean codebase.

Speaker: Kfir Bloch.

Currently the Head of Backend Engineering at Wix, Kfir has seen some things during the 17 years in the field. Unfortunately for him, Kfir has not lost his passion for hands on development, even though it usually collides with his day to day job of architecting and managing 70 developers.

His past includes working in various networking companies, and it seems that the past continues to haunt him - while he is working today to bring Wix to the NodeJS age, he can't seem to forget that he wrote server-side JavaScript on a Netscape server a long while ago.

Abstract: Java 8 and Beyond, a Scala Story

With Java 8 adoption skyrocketing, is Scala still relevant? In our opinion, the answer is an unequivocal yes. To make our point, Tomer Gabel (system architect at Wix) will showcase practical examples where Scala's features provide a definitive advantage over Java 8. These include:

Effective logging with traits and by-name parameters;
Pattern matching for fun and profit;
Partial function sugar and composition;
Type-safe, efficient serialization with type classes.

Speaker: Tomer Gabel.

A programming junkie and computer history aficionado, Tomer's been around the block a few times before settling at Wix as a system architect. In the last few of years he's developed a major crush on Scala, promoting it within the Israeli software industry as part of Java.IL (https://www.meetup.com/JavaIL/) (Israeli Java user group) and Underscore (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/underscore-il) (Israeli Scala user group) and organizing the annual Scalapeño (http://www.scalapeno.org.il/) conference in Tel-Aviv.