My thoughts about Functional Scala 2022 - London

Some months after my first big conference in Italy (Codemotion) here we are, moving into London to attend the biggest Scala conference, the Functional Scala conference.

For those who doesn't know (and in Italy there are a lot of people which doesn't know it) , Scala is a programming language which many people calls "java in the right way". It's a language which like his predecessor runs on JVM and here in Moneyfarm our services are built entirely with this language.

The conference was held in a really prestigious and cool venue called Royal Geographic Society , here there are also some art exhibitions and it's also close to the biggest park in London . It was quite a good venue, also the cathering was not very bad, especially the second day that they gave a lot of spicy food which I love.

It was a quite intensive program, there was almost no rest from a speaker to another (I would have preferred less talks and more pause between each other to let the people rest and think about what they've just seen).

Also some speakers IMHO were not very good at public speaking and could not entertain the audience, losing our attention after a short time. On the other hand there were some other speakers that were very engaging and knows very well how attract the attention and spark passion into other peoples.

After one full day of conference I was very tired and exhausted by the amount of informations, I was a little bit like this:

The fish instead was me after the conference:

Tapir + Armadillo ... an interesting duo

I had also the chance to meet one of the creators of Tapir, a library to define http endpoint which automatically allows to generate OpenApi Docs out of the box. I really like this library because it's well made and very easy to use and read/understand.

During the conference it has been presented also a new library called Armadillo, mainly focused on represent json-rpc endpoints . I liked the way the author decided to be inspired by Tapir since the json-rpc is the evolution of the classic http endpoints (and so also Armadillo in a certain way "evolves" Tapir)

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Furthermore I had also the chance to talk a lot with a lot of colleagues from different parts of the world (United states, Lisbon, Poland,etc...) and hear their stories and their opinions about Scala and many other things. Networking is absolutely my favourite part of a conference, sharing thoughts about tech and non-tech topics is always stimulating and helps me to understand new things or reflect on things that I thought I already knew.

Thursday program

Friday program

Zio... Zio everywhere

Like you can notice almost from the photos above, every talk is directly or indirectly linked to this Scala framework , ZIO.

ZIo is a Type-safe, composable asynchronous and concurrent programming for Scala created by Ziverge , and since they're also the organisers of this conference, this is probably the reason why every talk was about that. To be honest I would have liked to have more talks about different topics, for example cats and in general the typelevel-stack.

So did you like it or not?

If I have to rate it from a scale between 1 and 10 I would probably assign a 7.5, below a list of the reasons why I give this score:

• The organisation was a bit lacking (I would have liked to know the agenda before , they announced it too late in my opinion)

• It was too much ZIO-focused (even if it's understandable since it was organised by its founder)

• Some speakers were not very good at presenting and they didn't spark any passion or interest in their topics

• I would have preferred less talks and more time between one talk and another to give people time to relax and assimilate what they've just saw

In general it was a great experience and also helped me to improve my English knowledge and explore in a more deep way the Scala's ecosystem, but there's absolutely room for improvements in my opinion.

Were you at the conference? What do you think about this conference? Do you think that it was useful? if not, why? I'm really curious to hear a lot of different point of views!