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Making Meetup • Scaladays NYC 2016

Scaladays NYC 2016

This year, Meetup had the honor of sponsoring Scaladays NYC as well as hosting the official conference afterparty. For those unfamiliar with Scaladays, it is one of the largest yearly Scala conferences, often held in multiple cities around the world. This year’s conference in New York City had over six hundred attendees and almost sixty talks spread across four tracks over the course of two and a half days. Needless to say, myself and four other Meetup engineers had blast attending the conf.

(Opening keynote by Martin Odersky)

Some of our favorite talks in no particular order include (but are not limited to):

  • Data Structures of the Dark Side by Shimi Bandiel (@shimib)

  • Roll Your Own Shapeless by Daniel Spiewak (@djspiewak)

  • Implicits Inspected and Explained by Tim Soethout (@TimSoethout)

  • DDD and Onion Architecture in Scala by Wade Waldron (@wdwaldron)

  • Scala Goes Native by Denys Shabalin (@den_sh)

Two personal favorites of mine were Domain Driven Design and Onion Architecture by Wade Waldron and Being Creative with Genetic Algorithms and Typeclasses by Noel Markham (@noelmarkham). In his DDD talk, Wade illustrated DDD concepts via ‘the domain of cooking an egg,’ and even shared some sample code (https://github.com/WadeWaldron/scaladays2016). Noel’s talk was more Scala-centric, and was focused on explaining typeclasses by implementing a fun genetic algorithm which attempted to recreate the Mona Lisa.

(Side note: If anyone is interested in genetic algorithms, there’s a fun race car simulation that can be found here: http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/)

We also got to hear directly from some folks at Lightbend (formerly TypeSafe) and the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) who are helping push the boundaries of Scala development. I would highly recommend checking out EPFL’s Dotty project, which “is a platform to try out new language concepts and compiler technologies for Scala” (https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty). Other exciting projects that were presented at the conference included enhancements to Scala.js, a registry for Scala libraries, and also taking Scala native by providing memory management features to Scala developers (https://github.com/densh/scala-offheap). The EPFL also announced the launch of the Scala Center, a new initiative that will act as the open source foundation for Scala with representatives from both the community as well as industry.

And of course, no conference is complete without a popping afterparty, hosted at your’s truly: Meetup HQ. We were pleasantly surprised at the turnout and had a great time mingling and hearing about all the exciting things (Scala and non-Scala related) our peers in the tech community are pursuing.

(Yay party!)

We were even blessed by the attendance of Scala’s creator Martin Odersky, along with many other luminaries of the Scala community.

(Meetup + Martin Odersky + Friends)

If any of the above post was remotely interesting to you and you’d like to find out more about what we’re all about here at Meetup, check out these interviews with our engineers (http://making.meetup.com/tagged/hiring)!