Earlier this week I gave a 45 minute talk on “A day in the life of a functional programming”. The title is one Miles came up with when we were brainstorming the talk. The idea was to try to get across some of the exciting ideas in FP to non-Scala developers. We went for ADTs and type classes. Notes what I said (or...

This is the talk I gave at Brighton Astro. It’s a tour of six exoplanets I liked the look of. Follow along with the deck. Hello I’m going to share what I know about exoplanets. These are planets way outside our solar system. Planets that have been detected around other stars. To give them their full name they are extra...

I’m at QCon London this week, talking about how types work for us in the Functional Programming track. You take a look at the slides and watch the video recording. This post contains notes and slides for my talk. Premise Scala has a modern type system. That means it enables us to do things, rather than being there to...

At Scala Days 2015 in Amsterdam I talked about Scala.js, and in particular focussed on the great interoperability with JavaScript. This post gives additional links if you want to dig deeper.BackgroundIf you’re looking for more background information on CRDTs, Noel posted on this a while back.The algorithm I ran through...

I normally give talks about something technical: “Look! A thing we did!”. But this talk, from Scala eXchange, was different. It’s really about Scala team experiences we’ve had over the last couple of years. The sort of experiences are when get asked to review Scala projects and report back on how they look....

You’ve heard that Java 8 now has the main prerequisite for functional programming: functions. But you’re too busy writing Scala code to dig into the details, so we’ve put together a crib sheet on what’s in Java 8 from a Scala developer perspective. Lambda expressions The syntax for lambda expressions uses a thin arrow:...

At the end of last year I had some fun implementing a CRDT. These are data structures designed to combine together when you have no control over order of changes, timing of changes, or the number of participants in the data structure. The example I looked at was a sequential datatype, namely the WOOT CRDT for...

Pretty much the simplest thing you can do to get started with machine learning in a web app. These are my slides from BathCamp AI night: 

The Functional Brighton meetup for May was a set of short demos and talks on the subject of “What functional programming means to us”.  Kit kicked off the evening with an F# show-and-tell of a 3D flocking simulator (complete wth 3D glasses); Eric spoke about why he uses Haskell; Andy showed us some Scheme code and made...

John at the London Scala User Group ran “LSug Workshop: Up-close and personal with SBT” yesterday at Skillsmatter.  It was a kind of mini-unconference, and I contributed an introduction to SBT.  The video above is the first half of a screen recording I made, and it continues into part 2 on Youtube. I learnt a lot from...

Lift development has moved on from the depressingly long Maven commands to start a new project.  I made a screencast to show the simple build tool that I’m growing fond of, and an add-on for SBT called Lifty that makes it easy to create Lift projects. It took me a couple of attempts to make the video, so of course many...

You can find the video of this talk at:

Yesterday I gave a presentation at lsug.org on "Getting started with Lift".  When I first started looking at Lift I found it quite tricky to grasp what was going on, so I wanted to try to pass on my experiences to help people over any initial humps they may encounter, but also push out to show where you can go with...

Congratulations to the organizers of the London Java Community: the first unconference was a success. IBM kindly hosted the event at their Southbank building, and it’s a great location for an unconference. It has a set of rooms that are just the right size, but also has a central mingling point where you can meet and...