Distillery Developer Attends Scala Days Conference in New York

At the 2018 Scala Days North America conference, Distillery Scala Developer Artem Mitrakov learned many things. Chiefly, however, he learned how incredibly much there is to learn about Scala. The Scala community is steaming ahead, actively developing Scala-based technologies and frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Akka Streams, Akka HTTP, Apache Kafka) that, according to Artem, “can help make apps more efficient, stable, and robust.”

Annually, Scala Days brings together developers from across the globe to share their knowledge, experience, and ideas about building apps with the Scala programming language and related technologies. Artem, who attended the New York conference with colleagues from Santa Monica and Kenya, found the experience “very good” overall. He appreciated the wide variety of topics, including a presentation of Scala 3.0 (the current version is 2.12) and a range of useful tools, platforms, and frameworks. He also enjoyed the opportunity to meet and network with other Scala developers.

Artem found one session, “Patterns for Streaming Telemetry with Akka Streams,” particularly valuable. The presenter began with a simple problem related to a batch insert to a database — a problem for which he’d suggested a simple solution. When he adapted the problems to actual conditions, however, his simple solution morphed into a mess of code. Fortunately, he discovered that, as Artem recounts, “Akka Streams patterns can easily solve these issues in a very concise and elegant way.” Artem explains that his team faced the same issue on a recent Tala app development project. All the old microservices were written in an old-fashioned, tangled way. He explains, “Now, we’ve also started using Akka Streams in new microservices and discovered the same advantages.”

Artem’s only complaints about the conference focused on things outside the scope of most developers working in production. For example, the conference presented a great many “experimental” tools — things like compilers, Java virtual machines, and build tools — which aren’t practical for use with a live app. Artem was most energized by learning about the tools and technologies he can use in his day-to-day work. He’s excited to continue using his new knowledge to help his project teams leverage Scala to build even stronger apps.

At Distillery, we strive to stay on the leading edge of developing languages, technologies, and trends. By sending our developers to conferences like Scala Days, we ensure we can capitalize on the best fit-for-purpose technologies available.

Want to hear more about how we invest in education to keep our dev team up to date? Let us know!