What are some of the most interesting sessions coming up in Scala Days Amsterdam?



Woah! Scala Days is sold out and we hope you had a chance to be one of the lucky ones with a ticket. This time around the conference takes place in Amsterdam and features 55 (!) different talks in 3 action packed days with 4 parallel tracks. To decide which sessions to attend, we turned to 9 of the speakers and asked: “If you could attend only one session, which session would it be?”. Well, apart from their own of course. And apart from the keynote. And the lunch breaks. And the drinks… Some didn’t follow the rules! But we let a few of those glitches slip.



Now, let’s take a look at the speaker’s choice:

(or… TL;DR: Just take me to your final list)

1. Joe Kutner, JVM Platform Owner @ Heroku

What: Type-safe off-heap memory for Scala

Who: Denys Shabalin

When: Tuesday at 10:25am

Why: “A common problem I see when debugging Scala apps on Heroku is the leaking of off-heap memory. Many frameworks allocate native memory to improve performance, which can get an app into trouble. I’m hoping this talk will shed some light on how such a tricky practice can be managed well.”

2. Dean Wampler, Big Data Architect @ Typesafe

What: From Source: Scala at Twitter

Who: Stu Hood

When: Tuesday at 13:30pm

Why: “The first big user of Scala and still one of the biggest.”

What: Large volume data analysis on the Typesafe Reactive Platform

Who: Martin Zaplatel

When: Tuesday at 16:50pm

Why: “Martin Zapletal’s talk on the common underpinnings of many Big Data systems is near and dear to my heart”

3. Tal Weiss, CEO @ OverOps

What: Exercise in machine learning

Who: Jan Machacek

When: Tuesday at 18:00pm

Why: “This talk leads a hands-on approach with some of the hottest tech available today: Building a system that collects data from a wearable fitness tracker, communicating through a mobile app to an actor system with some help from Spark to process the data.”

Pssst… This just in: If you ever need to debug your application in production, here comes a session that will help you master 5 advanced production debugging techniques for Scala and Akka. Check out Tal’s talk on Tuesday @ 13:20pm.

4. Noel Welsh, Partner @ Underscore

What: Types vs Tests: An Epic Battle?

Who: Amanda Laucher

When: Wednesday at 10:25am

Why: “Even after six years of using Scala I feel like I’m still evolving my approach to testing. I certainly write fewer tests than when I was using a dynamically typed language but I certainly don’t feel that types replace all tests. I’m hoping this talk will directly inspire my current programming practice.”

5. Jan Mahchek, CTO @ Cakesoultions

What: Ensime – why would anybody build another Scala IDE?

Who: Sam Halliday and Rory Graves

When: Wednesday at 11:35am

Why: “I keep hearing wonderful things about Emacs, yet all I know is just how to quit it once I start it. And I could that as an achievement. So, I am very keen to find out what Sam’s been up to with Ensime, and hopefully find out enough of Emacs-magic to give it a serious try.”

What: The road to sbt 1.0 is paved with server

Who: Josh Suereth and Eugene Yokota

When: Wednesday at 15:40pm

Why: “Every time I use SBT in my projects, I learn something new. It is wonderfully flexible, once one finds how to use it properly, that is. The SBT mastermind Josh will no doubt show me many useful things I can use in my projects now; more importantly, he’ll show where SBT is heading.”

6. Richard Dallaway, Partner @ Underscore

What: Lambda Architecture with Spark Streaming, Kafka, Cassandra, Akka and Scala

Who: Helena Edelson

When: Tuesday at 11:35am

Why: “That’s a big stack of ideas, and hearing from Helena’s experiences seems like astonishing good way to spend 45 minutes.”

7. Toby Sullivan, Engineering Lead @ Hootsuite

What: GraphX: Graph analytics for insights about developer communities

Who: Paco Nathan

When: Tuesday at 10:25am

Why: “Paco Nathan’s talk on GraphX and his analysis of developer communities will probably be my highlight of Scala Days 2015. Representing data as graphs is the next big step for businesses looking to uncover critical insights. Seeing how this is being done in the real world will be helpful as I start learning how to apply these concepts at Hootsuite.”

8. Martin Zaplatel, Software Engineer @ Cakesoultions

What: Project Gålbma: Actors vs. Types

Who: Roland Kuhn

When: Tuesday at 10:25am

Why: “The Actor model and Akka in particular has proven to be a very powerful tool to express truly asynchronous and distributed systems. This project adds compile time type checks to Actor interactions, introduces some other new approaches that further improve Akka and removes some previous constraints.”

What: So how do I do a 2-phase-commit with Akka then?

Who: Lutz Huehnken

When: Wednesday at 14:30pm

Why: “The talk looks into threading and some pitfalls of distributed computing. It should help with mindset change and explain how asynchronous and distributed computing must be approached.”

9. Lutz Huehnken, Solutions Architect @ Typesafe

What: Function-Passing Style, A New Model for Asynchronous and Distributed Programming

Who: Heather Miller and Philipp Haller

When: Tuesday at 16:50

Why: “I’ve seen talks by both of them and really like their presentation styles. And the topic is just in the right space in between theoretical considerations and real-world usefulness. I’m over-simplifying here, but it’s basically about leaving your data where it is and get the code to the data (rather than the other way around, as is often the case). A concept with immediate appeal in the big data world, but not too easy to get right. Don’t miss that one!”



And the top picks are…

Tuesday

10:25am – Type-safe off-heap memory for Scala // Denys Shabalin

10:25am – GraphX: Graph analytics for insights about developer communities // Paco Nathan

10:25am – Project Gålbma: Actors vs. Types // Roland Kuhn

11:35am – Lambda Architecture with Spark Streaming, Kafka, Cassandra, Akka and Scala // Helena Edelson

13:30pm – Fixing Reactive Code at 100 Miles per Hour: Five Techniques to Improve How You Debug Scala and Akka // Tal Weiss

13:30pm – From Source: Scala at Twitter // Stu Hood

14:30pm – The Twelve Factor App: Best Practices for Scala Deployment // Joe Kutner

16:50pm – Large volume data analysis on the Typesafe Reactive Platform // Martin Zaplatel

16:50pm – Function-Passing Style, A New Model for Asynchronous and Distributed Programming // Heather Miller and Philipp Haller

18:00pm – Exercise in machine learning // Jan Machacek

18:00pm – Essential Scala: Six Core Principles for Learning Scala // Noel Welsh

Wednesday

10:25am – Types vs Tests: An Epic Battle? // Amanda Laucher

10:25am – Why Spark Is the Next Top (Compute) Model // Dean Wampler

11:35am – Ensime – why would anybody build another Scala IDE? // Sam Halliday and Rory Graves

13:20pm – Towards Browser and Server Utopia with Scala.JS: an example using CRDTs // Richard Dallaway

14:30pm – So how do I do a 2-phase-commit with Akka then? // Lutz Huehnken

15:40pm – The road to sbt 1.0 is paved with server // Josh Suereth and Eugene Yokota

15:40pm – Low-Friction Microservices with Scala and Play // Toby Sullivan

Have some free time in-between the sessions? Then come say hi! You can recognize us by the Scala monster T-shirts 🙂

Using Akka? Request an early access invite for OverOps reactive monitoring tool.