Highlights from Scala Days @ San Francisco

New Post: Scala Days: 6 of the Best Talks You Probably Missed http://t.co/w4armAvYTI pic.twitter.com/bZetjvH7sG — Takipi (@takipid) March 19, 2015

Scala Days was happening in San Francisco this week, and the presenters there gave some excellent talks on the hottest topics in the Scala world. If you were there, you could find discussions on Scala as a language, on practical deployments, on the tools landscape, and even on Keyboard Cat:

Not everyone is able to attend the conference of course, so to give a little flavor of what you’re missing out on, here are six of these presentations:

1. Keynote

Martin Odersky gave the keynote to kick off the conference. It was a super interesting look at the past, present, and future of Scala, with an exploration of potential directions that Scala can be taken. Absolutely worth checking out.

2. Visualize the things

Lee Mighdoll, who does service engineering at Nest Labs, gave a talk about an open source tool he works on called Sparkle, “a small suite of libraries for making interactive data visualizations.” He intro’d the tool, then dove into performance, scaling, and architecture elements, before wrapping up with some general tips and tricks.

The slides are available right here.

3. Akka in Production: Why and How

Evan Chan, a principal engineer at Socrata Inc., gave a talk on Akka in production. He looked at Akka from a practical standpoint, discussing getting started with Akka, and Akka use cases and tips.

4. Toward a Safer Scala

Leif Wickland, a software engineer at Oracle, presented on static analysis tools in Scala. In his talk, he discussed the reason and need for these kind of tools in Scala (as well as what they are). As part of the Beginner track, Leif’s talk had easily accessible examples for the elements he was discussing.

5. Quantifind’s story: Building custom interactive data analytics infrastructure

Ryan LeCompte, a software engineer at Quantifind, gave a talk discussing his company’s challenges, efforts, and solutions in building out their customized data analytics infrastructure with an Akka cluster and Scala.

6. Why you might like Scala.js

Li Haoyi is a software engineer at Dropbox. In this talk he gives an overview of Scala.js, a Scala to Javascript compiler that lets you write Scala source code, compile it to Javascript, and run it in the browser.

The slides for the talk are available here.

There’s a lot going on in the world of Scala these days, and Scala Days is a great spot to get a sense of that (or at least bask in the buzz). Keep an eye out for more talks and videos out there as the conference wraps up.

Found a cool talk that we didn’t mention? Please let us know in the comments below.