Last week I went to Scala eXchange 2012, in London. The conference was great, and I’ll have more to say about it later, perhaps through other means different than here. Not sure yet. I’ll also talk about the event in the next Scaladores Meeting.

The first thing I want to say is that I love London, and it was really great to go there again, after a few years. So thank you Skills Matter for being in London!!

Now to the meat of the event. Scala. Two days full of Scala, both ending in beer and pizza. Can’t ask for much more. I’ll quickly mention a few talks I liked, together with some pictures. First off, the event was in a really charming location, as you can see in the picture bellow:

the crypt – scala exchange

The conference started with Martin Odersky himself. He talked a lot about the progress of scala in general. First, from the point of view of his course in Coursera. Then, he proceeded to talk about the new features coming on scala 2.10.

Martin Odersky

There were several other talks during the day. One of them was the Enrik’s talk about the Typesafe console architecture, which was quite nice, and Spiewak’s talk about compilers. This last one was just… amazing. If you are curious, you can watch the video of the talk here, its really worth your time. Now, a couple more pictures:

Enrik on the Typesafe Console

Spiewak on Compilers

The first day ended with an Akka code kata. I spent some time there to see how people “from the source” are teaching Akka. Interesting to see I’m doing it myself on a similar way =)

The second day was interesting as well, full of small speeches. I liked them in general. One was really good: Roland Kuhn’s talk about Akka. He talked about what is coming on the next Akka release, and it is promising.

Roland on Akka

Another one was very promising as well: Jon Pretty, talking about Rapture.io. This is an IO framework he is working on which sounds really interesting. He did lots of demos reading and writing data, always with simple and readable lines of code. I’m curious to see how far this project is going.

Jon on Rapture IO

In summary, it was a long (and a bit expensive…) trip to get to Scala eXchange, but the whole experience was well worth the effort. I hope to return next year.