Last week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at Northeast Scala Symposium, this is the story of my experience.

The symposium has been gathering Scala enthusiasts for ten years now, and while most of the attendees come from the east-coast of the U.S., it’s usual for European folks to join as well. It’s really three different conferences on three successive days. The first day of talks is the Typelevel Summit, followed by the proper NE Scala lineup, and a day of unconference. My talk was part of the first day. If you’re not familiar with the Scala ecosystem, Typelevel is an organization of volunteers that develop open-source libraries geared toward functional programming. They have set a goal of promoting functional programming through not only through code, but also through great learning material; and they are committed to building a welcoming, inclusive community. The most popular Typelevel project is Cats, a library for functional programming that is also one of the best documented pieces of software I know.