SF Scala: Enhancing Spark's Power with ZIO, Qubism and NLP at Scale, Using Nix for Haskell

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Great talks from 3 great speakers! Thank you Demandbase for hosting, virtually this time. Talk1: "Enhancing Spark's Power with ZIO" by Leo Benkel Summary: Combining ZIO/Future with Spark can drastically speed up the performance of your ML projects, as data sources can be fetched in parallel without holding up computation. Obviously ZIO is much better than Future, but it can be challenging to set up. Leo will present some benchmark results, then discuss how his open-source library handles all boilerplate issues so you can easily implement Spark and ZIO in your ML projects! Bio: Leo Benkel grew up in France and has been living in San Francisco for the last 10 years. He is passionate about functional programming and teaches Scala at Demandbase. He enjoys designing/architecting libraries and software products. Simply, Leo loves exploring where nobody has ever been before and working with teams that want to create the "possible" out of the "improbable". His draw to exploration and adventure also carry over to life outside of work. When he’s not working, Leo enjoys video games, movies, TV shows, board games, traveling, and eating/cooking good food. Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/LeoBenkel/2020-0326-meet-up-z-parkio-230980911 Talk2: "Qubism and NLP at Scale with Scala" by Jerome Banks Summary: Qubism is a library of design patterns that focus on data aggregations and OLAP-like “cube” data. Cubism is implemented in Scala and Spark, and leverages XUnit and YPath strings to slice-and-dice segments for aggregations…