About the Presentation: Scala is the most popular language on the JVM that isn't named Java [1]. Scala developers are happier and get paid drastically more on average than Java developers[2]. What is it about this weird FP/OO hybrid language that is so enticing? What is it about it that prevents it from gaining much market share over the last year?

In this talk, I'm going to attempt to teach you just enough Scala to learn more on your own, and get you excited enough about it to do so. This talk will target developers with a non-zero amount of Java experience and near zero Scala experience. Scala code snippets will have an equivalent Java code snippet available for use as a Rosetta stone.

Rough Agenda 1. Scala Philosophy. 2. Hello Scala! 3. Case classes and pattern matching. 4. Class vs. Object vs. Trait. What do these mean? 5. For comprehensions. Not your average for loop. 6. Java is a strongly typed language. Why do people say Scala has a stronger type system? 7. Let's talk about the FP part of Scala. 8. Performance and benchmarking compared to Java. 9. What is Scala bad at?

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/20/language-rankings-1-19/ [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-technologies

About the Presenters: BJ Kennedy has been doing functional programming professionally on the JVM in Scala and Clojure for the past 7 years. A few examples of applications that he has built using Scala include

• Data Ingestion Pipelines using Spark that pull in hundreds of terabytes of data.
• Microservices using Scalatra and Http4s
• Recommendation engines
• Full Stack Development using Play

Prior to going to school to be a Software Engineer, BJ served in the US Army in Alaska for 6 years, and is an OIF veteran.