scala.bythebay.io: Dick Wall Interview
Recording: scala.bythebay.io: Dick Wall Interview
you my name is dick wall I'm actually positions at the moment including escalate software we do training and a company called C by technologies we are hiring and there's another one a lot of wine company and they're not hiring or whatever but I'm still quite over utilized on all fronts so yeah so I guess the history here would be are going back way way more than 10 years I was doing a podcast called the java posse from several you know over a decade ago and about the time we started the java posse there were a lot of rumors of Java's demise imminent demise there was Ruby on Rails was coming in big time c-sharp was beginning to get really big and people like the look of things like the the closures that it had and the sum of more functional features that i had and meanwhile Java haven't really changed in a long time so a lot of people were saying it's dead you know it's it's time is over and at least for me c-sharp wasn't really an option because i'm a Linux guy i use Linux for many years so I started looking around at that point for another language on the JVM that held some of the same ideals as Java but maybe took things a bit a bit further forward and had a bit more of a future outlook to it and a friend of mine called Karl Quinn at the time also on the posse told me about this language called Scala that sounded like it fit the bill and so I started to set about learning it and at the time was very difficult to learn there was there was one book that had just come out on its programming in Scala and there was a few resources on the internet some PDFs like Scala by example and apart from that there really wasn't much to go on so one of the first things I did was supper a scholar user group bay area scholar enthusiasts and the idea there was to just get people in that I could learn from but it took me quite a few months to sort of get to a point of being able to use scholar on a day-to-day basis and I met bill venez around that time and we decided that it would be a good idea and an opportunity to set up some training and accelerate people's first steps through scholar so they didn't have to go through what we went through in the first place to learn it so that's really where the training that we started doing came from and that's that's morphed over time we now do advanced training for library developers and very advanced programmers that sort of thing but yeah ultimately probably about 10 years ago was when I first got into it and it was because at the time Java didn't really hold a lot of interest for me anymore and I was looking for the next thing gosh I use such a diversity of things that I don't know that I necessarily have an ideal stack I will say the libraries that I consistently use from project to project one of the first libraries that I grabbed and it's a Java library but a very high quality one is guava for any project that I'm working on guavas one of the first things to go in it has a great caching solution that's that suits almost any in caching Oh in-memory caching problem that you want to you want to use it for I always end up bringing in one of many JSON fibrous because the world runs on JSON these days futures I use the built-in futures an awful lot alka of course I've used play on things lots and lots at a house so many libraries shapeless of course always ends up in there some way i am not even sure i can remember all the things that I that I draw but a lot of the stuff that I do varies wildly from project to project so there isn't really one stack because the the the needs change so much and what I really do appreciate about Scala is that you get an awful lot just as out you know out of the box as a platform there's often not a lot of stuff that you need to add to that to get something at least working quickly and then you kind of after a while get used to the usual suspects of things you can know you you know you can go and grabbing working very quickly so yeah it's yeah it's hard to be more specific than that I'm afraid just a wild collection of different things that get used on different projects why you know I've been concentrating so much on my token I haven't really looked at the the following agenda the ones I've seen today though i did i really enjoy well i love coming to these conferences anyway because I bump into all the people that I know from the community it's always good to see see them there's always good to bump into miles of course and he did a great talk on tight level and the that the future of the tight level initiative I guess it's a good word for that I was good to see Adrian again and good to see his talk on Scarlett 212 I knew what was coming to a large degree in that but it's still good to see some of the details of how it was implemented and how well it's working and also some of the news about what's you know what the focus is for 2 dot 13 I guess I'd heard but seeing it sort of up there on a slide really drove it home and Josh the rhett and I have been like he'll he'll love the fact that I'm signing him up for work right now but we've been talking about revisiting views for a little while and it really seems like now is a good time just to try and pick that up again we've done a little more than talk up until this point but I really think that it would be a good time to sort of dust that off and try and get that effort going again so those are the ones that really stick out so far I think today you