Jon Pretty

I was very nervous before I gave my first ever Scala training last year, and I started by waffling to the attendees to be forgiving. One interrupted me: "Jon. You'll be fine... just get on with it!" I needed that right then, and I'm ever grateful to the person who said it.

Over the next few months, I'll be running the Advanced Type Mechanics course—everything about Scala types—across Europe. As a minimum: Berlin, London, Paris and Warsaw. I'll announce dates soon, but don't hesitate to DM me if you'd like to fully understand Scala's type system!

I spend most of my time writing open-source software, so doing a modest amount of training is what pays my bills. Even if Advanced Type Mechanics isn't for you, putting me in touch with people and companies who may be interested is a huge help. You're supporting Fury development!

I’m curious - do you do any courses on application design? It’s where I see a lot of people (myself included) struggle. There’s lots of good concepts floating around, but tying a few together into a neat, organised, maintainable app isn’t easy.

I don't, and although I've got experience in this area, it feels really really difficult to generalize my ideas (which lie somewhere in the objective-subjective continuum) into something teachable, beyond a few basic rules.

Yeah that’s what I’ve found. I’ve tried to set up some basic apps, but even that gets difficult with rapidly diverging opinions on the best approach. Although even simple rules in a workshop might be valuable :-)

The design choices can also vary wildly depending on the constraints. People have different degrees of adherence to different paradigms like FP. My approach is solidly typesafe, but typically not fully FP. Some people wouldn't accept that!

Yeah that’s definitely something we’ve struggled with. We have a lot of internally trained scala devs, which means our adherence to FP principles can vary within teams. Hard to get the right balance.