Idea for the next meetup

[Guillaume Massé]

Hi Guys,

We should gather ideas for the next Meetup. A hands-on hackaton was proposed.

I suggest we solve some bioinformatics problems available at http://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/.

Gui

[felix]

Thanks Guillaume for the proposal. I love it and it provides the missing piece I was looking for!!! 

The last meetup was a huge success and I had lots of great feedback about it! 

I want to keep the momentum going.

One of the paradox I see in the Scala community is the gap between the Scala companies in Montreal looking for devs and all the dev interested in Scala but that might not feel comfortable enough to apply for Scala positions. I would like to close that gap.

A few of us discussed some options at the Reservoir after the last meetup and one idea that came out was to host a very hands-on meetup and build something the Scala Montreal members could relate to (i.e a web service). The idea was to use Twitter Finagle. But Finagle uses extensively the notion of functions and Futures which might be rough for those not too familiar with Scala.

So here is my proposal for the next two meetups:

November Meetup: Hands-on Functional Programming

Part 1 (about 30 mins): I would do a quick intro to Functional Programming: its motivations, constraints, techniques and benefits. Nothing super advanced or scary.

Part 2 (in teams): I suggest we switch to the hands-on mode and work on a few selected problems from Guillaume's link using FP. They are real problem and are simple enough and very well suited for FP. 

December Meetup: Future and Finagle

Part 1 (about 30 mins): It would be a quick intro to Future and their associated functions/combinators (Philippe?).

Part 2 (in teams): We would provide a template Finagle project to clone and we would wrap the implementations we worked on in the previous meetup into web services using Finagle. From there on, I think there are many possible paths depending on which features the different teams want to explore.

What do you guys think? 

Félix

[Guillaume Masse]

Sound good. I can ask a prof at UdeM to join our meetup and explain some biological notions.

-Gui

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[Pierre-Alexandre Lacerte]

J'aime bien le concept:) I'm in!

[Philippe Laflamme]

Hey,

I think a hands-on meetup is a great idea! 

For the "intro" meetup, how about we also have a part for introducing Scala itself (its syntax, functions, collections, pattern matching, etc.) Twitter built awesome learning material: Scala School[1]. I've given it as a talk in the past (a modified, shorter version[2]) and seemed to be well received. Maybe we could use ScalaKata to make it more interactive?

We also have some material for a hands-on session using Finagle[3]. I'd be happy to do this as part of the hands-on session. I can certainly make some slides for introducing Futures and concurrency concepts as well...

Philippe

[1] http://twitter.github.io/scala_school/

[2] http://hopper.github.io/scala-school/

[3] https://github.com/hopper/scala-school-2

On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 8:34 AM, felix <felixtr...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Philippe Laflamme]

Hey,

If you can't find anyone, I used to work in bioinformatics and I think I can explain some of the basic concepts needed for these problems... That said, a UdeM professor would provide much more precise answers than my hand-wavy ones ;)

Cheers,

Philippe

[felix]

Thanks Philippe. The hopper scala-school is very well done and we should really devote on session on this to introduce Scala.

My main concern is time.

So what I suggest is to create/find a concise Scala syntax cheat-sheet (e.g. http://alvinalexander.com/downloads/scala/Scala-Cheat-Sheet-devdaily.pdf but even simpler). We could have copies available during the meetup for reference. 

Do you think that could be enough for those not too familiar to Scala to participate while allowing the meetup to focus on something more 'meaty'?

Félix

[Philippe Laflamme]

Hey,

Yes, I'll have to agree: the scala-school was a full 1 hour session just by itself (plus another 1 hour for the hands-on session).

That cheat-sheet is really good! With a few printed copies available (yes, I'm suggesting we use PAPER!), I think that would be sufficient for a hands-on session.

If you ever want to organize a lets-learn-scala meetup, feel free to use the other material. I'd be happy to participate, but that material is out there for anyone to use...

Cheers,

Philippe

[Félix-Étienne Trépanier]

+1 on the paper version :)

Ok, I'll send the invite in the next few days.

Philippe, we should sync up later about the second part on Future and Finagle. I think the presentation you did last time was awesome so we should reuse it.

Also, how about we do a January "New Year Resolution - Learn Scala" meetup with the scala-school material?

Felix

[Philippe Laflamme]

That new-years resolution is catchy! I like it! I'd be happy to help (presenting or otherwise)...

The finagle presentation was really about finagle, but we can rip out any useful things about Futures and concurrency. There's also some hands-on material we could use now that I think about it... Let's chat!

Philippe

[Nicolas Marchildon]

+1 on all the above.

I like that you focus on developers with no Scala experience.