Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

Bootstrapping the Web with Scala Native

Scala Native is immensely exciting -- finally, we have a bare-metal language with functional data structures and higher-kinded types! This unusual prospect of a powerful and well-established language, without a legacy platform, gives us a rare chance to reimagine the foundations of the systems we build.

But how do we build useful software without the capabilities and abstractions that we've come to expect from a comprehensive standard library?

In this talk, we'll fill in the gaps in Scala Native's capabilities by delving deep into UNIX folklore, from netcat to Docker. In the process, we'll reframe web programming as a systems problem, rather than an application development problem. And we'll learn about the power and the danger of low-level systems programming in a modern cluster environment like Kubernetes.

Richard Whaling

Richard Whaling

Spantree Technology Group

Richard is a consultant at Spantree Technology Group, where he mostly works on Scala-based technologies like Akka, Kafka, and Spark. Before Spantree, he spent most of a decade in academia working on graph databases and natural language processing. On his own time, he's inclined to hack on experimental musical instruments and analog synthesizers.