Last Thursday (13.04.2023) I had the pleasure to speak at the 5th edition of Tech Bytes in Kraków.

TL;DR This post is a short recap of the event

🔧 The right tools for the right job

This edition had two talks scheduled, both focused on programming languages, specifically Scala and Elixir. “The right tools for the right job” was the topic of the meeting.

The talks were:

• Get rid of boilerplate with Scala by myself
• What is Elixir and what it can do with concurrency challenges? - sharing Elixirator insights by Józef Pawlikowski and Alexander Sosnovskiy

Sadly Alexander wasn’t able to join us but Józef did his best to present his peer’s part.

📖 What have I learned

During presentations

My key takeaway from the talk about Elixir is that it’s an Erlang derivative that promotes the functional programming approach. Thanks to being based on Erlang, it’s able to use all the goodies built in it’s virtual machine.

I’ve learned that both Elixir and Erlang provide very rich built-in toolkit for building highly scalable, distributed systems. This includes distributed key-value called Mnesia and Erlang’s actor model. The later has inspired Akka Actors for Scala.

During networking

After the presentations there was the networking part, something that I value equally or even more than the talks. I had the opportunity to talk to numerous people with different backgrounds and experience.

We have covered some of the topics I’ve talked about in more details. I’ve also got some expiring questions about Scala, especially from people who are just getting started with the language.

This has motivated me to write more about concepts like type derivations or framework-less approach.

If you have any ideas for newcomer-friendly topics that could use some more explanation - feel free to reach out!