Company (Scala) Bootcamp

[Michael Schmitz]

Hi, I work for a small company and we are interested in having a bootcamp for new employees.  They would spend a week or two working on a project that doesn't necessarily contribute to the business with the aim of learning our development processes.  They would learn to use:

1.  Scala

2.  Sbt

3.  Git/GitHub

As well as our specific practices within those systems (i.e. how we do unit testing, how we do code reviews, etc.)

I know of several resources for learning Scala, but I'm specifically interested in resources that involve specific problems/assignments that need to be completed to drive someone's learning and keep them focused.  I remember hearing about some work in this direction a long time ago, but I didn't see anything on docs.scala-lang.org.

What project-oriented materials do you know of for learning Scala?

Peace.  Michael

[Tim Pigden]

depending on the urgency, you could have them all join the coursera "functional programming in Scala" which next runs 25th April. We did that at work when it first came out and it was very useful. In fact I'd say have them do that anyway - regardless of your other efforts.

Tim

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[Michael Schmitz]

It's a re-run?  I enjoyed the course.  Unfortunately I don't think this works in general because we will have a *lot* of new hires in the next year.

> In fact I'd say have them do that anyway - regardless of your other efforts.

Yes, that's a good suggestion!

Peace.  Michael

[Alexandru Nedelcu]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 11:04 PM, Michael Schmitz <mic...@schmitztech.com> wrote:

It's a re-run?  I enjoyed the course.

Yes, it will happen again on April 25th: https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

When I participated in it (first edition), after it was over it wasn't accepting any new user accounts, yet as a user that participated in it, I was having access to all the materials (and I think even the homework grader was still working for validating your homework). So for a colleague that wanted to learn, I downloaded and handed him the materials - videos, homework archives and descriptions and so on. It still worked out well, because in case he had questions, I knew what to answer since I participated in it. So even if you'll get new hires after the course ends, you could do this too (just don't distribute anything on the Internet).

I think we can agree that this course is very basic and teaches things that are now common sense for many of us, however it's easy to forget that newcomers have a very hard time coming to grips with basic FP / JVM stuff, like "don't use vars, unless you really, really have to and for global mutable state make sure to freaking synchronize accesses and oh, don't block threads either, unless you know exactly what thread-pool will block and you know exactly what you're freaking doing". In this sense, this FP course is at the same awesome, but incomplete. It's hard sometimes to make newcomers learn the basics, not just of Scala, but of everything else required, like multi-threading or common-sense hygiene rules when writing code - like, apparently some people have a really hard time to format their code, like in following the style rules, separating ideas in paragraphs, ignoring warnings and so on, blaming the IDE in the process.

This is why you should be prepared for a lot of code reviews and in case somebody pukes pieces of code that ignore the guidelines, it's better to mercilessly revert / delete everything that someone did, then to introduce technical debt in the codebase. Be wary of the "broken window effect" because it's very real ;-)

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