Interview with Alan Hardy, Programme Lead for Scala eXchange

Alan Hardy is the Programme Lead for the inaugural Scala eXchange, which is taking place at the Skills Matter eXchange in London on the 15th and 16th June, 2011:

http://skillsmatter.com/event/scala/scala-exchange-2011/cs-1808

Alan has assembled a stella line-up. Among many others:

• Martin Odersky will be the Keynote Speaker - Martin will also give a talk on the new Scala Eclipse plug-in
• James Strachan will introduce Scalate, the Scala Template Engine in his Keynote kicking off Day 2
• Viktor Klang will speak about Futures in the Akka toolkit
• Chris Marshall will discuss his Finance experience with Scala
• Jason Zaugg will talk about functional programming with Scalaz
  

Additionally, there will be two sessions of 15 minute Lightning Talks looking at Scala use in the Enterprise.

By day, Alan is senior FX developer/architect at Deutsche Bank. I spoke to him about why he is organising a Scala event, who would find Scala eXchange useful and why include a trip to the pub!

Craig Smith:  How do you explain the growth of Scala?

Alan Hardy:  The incredible flexibility, power and expressiveness of the Scala language has always been it's major strength. What we are seeing now, as the language has matured, is a kind of word of mouth explosion of interest amongst developers and organisations. Scala is both fun to use and incredibly versatile. The tooling has vastly improved, there are now numerous books, articles and presentations to make getting started simple. The Open Source community is vibrant and innovative, having developed many World Class frameworks alongside high profile company success stories to further boost interest. It's an exciting time to start using Scala.

CS:  What does Scala mean to you?

AH:  I've found myself looking at design, architecture and problem-solving in a completely new light! That, combined with a growing understanding of functional-style programming, is helping me become a better developer.

CS:  Why are you organising Scala eXchange?

AH:  Nothing beats getting a group of experts and enthusiasts together in the same room to increase learning and innovation of ideas. I've read books, watched online videos but still learn more and meet many interesting people through these styles of events. It's also important for organisations ready to adopt Scala to understand how deep the community is and learn from their experiences.

CS:  What format will Scala eXchange take? 

AH:  Alongside 2 days of expert talks, we are organising a series of hands-on follow-up tutorials with the experts and lightning talks about a whole series of related topics and shared experiences with the language. The combination of talk and tutorial is a great way to kick-start your development.

CS:  Who would benefit from attending Scala eXchange?

AH:  Anyone from Scala newbie to black belt guru. We will also have a number of enterprise users to share stories and experiences for organisations looking to move onto the platform.

CS:  Beside Scala, what other topics will be covered?

AH:  Scala doesn't live in isolation on the application stack. Other topics we will touch on are concurrency in general, cloud-based scalability, sql/nosql integration and web solutions.

CS:  Why include Lightning Talks at Scala eXchange?

AH:  It's a great way to learn a much wider range of topics in a short period. It's highly interactive and many of the talks will be from enterprise users sharing their experience of using Scala and what stack they have adopted.

CS:  How do people make suggestions for Scala eXchange or put their name forward to speak?

AH:  We have an email address: scalax [at] skillsmatter [dot] com for people to submit ideas for talks or make any suggestions regarding the event.

CS:  How do gatherings like Scala eXchange help Scala move forward?

AH:  As a community, it's important to get involved, meet and share ideas. Scala will only grow as the community of users grows. It's also very important to share experience and better understand the use cases for the many organisations adopting Scala. Then we can make it simpler to get started and provide a rich base of experienced developers to drawn on. 

CS:  How does a visit to the pub help?

AH:  Errr, this is more a meta-physical question :) I've had some of my best conversations and met many interesting people while holding a beer in my hand. I believe it's a community necessity to mingle in a bar somewhere.