Note: Location and Date updated to accommodate more guests



Big thanks to our friends at HomeAway (https://www.homeaway.com/) for hosting at a larger venue, and sponsoring food and beverages!



Dean will be in town for the Reactive Summit (https://www.reactivesummit.org/), and kindly agreed to present to our meetup. Attendance will be capped, so RSVP early.



Why Scala Is Great for Data Science and Engineering



Dean Wampler will explore some of the practical issues of doing data science today and why Scala succeeds as a general-purpose language for engineering tasks, and even for data science itself. Dean will discuss features of Scala that accelerate productivity, but also discuss the drawbacks of Scala compared to alternatives like Python.



Bio



Dean Wampler, Ph.D. (@deanwampler), is the Architect for Big Data Products and Services in the Office of the CTO at Lightbend, where he focuses on the evolving "Fast Data" ecosystem for streaming applications based on Spark, Kafka, Mesos, the Lightbend Reactive Platform, and other tools. Dean is also an advocate for Functional Programming and Scala. He contributes to several open source projects and and he co-organizes several Chicago-area Meetup groups and several conferences worldwide, including Strata + Hadoop World. Dean is the author or co-author of several books from O'Reilly.