Heather: In this talk, I'll present my ongoing research on a new programming model for asynchronous and distributed programming. For now, we call it "function-passing" or "function-passing style", and it can be thought of as an inversion of the actor model – keep your data stationary, send and apply your functionality (functions/spores) to that stationary data, and get typed communication all for free, all in a friendly collections/futures-like package! I'll also cover how I spent some of my time at Databricks – porting Scala Pickling to Spark, and will give a status update on new features we've added and battle-hardening we've done to Pickling to make this happen.