We’ve had a few recent public appearances in the beginning of 2021, and more are upcoming:
- Adam introduced the Cats Effect library and the release of his new book, Essential Effects, for the SF and Singapore Scala meetup groups. You can watch either version here or here. (Adam likes the second recording better because he had more practice.)
- Adam was on The Scala Logs podcast talking about the release of Essential Effects and a bunch of other nerdy things. Take a listen!.
- Noel will be presenting at the Scala Love in the City conference on Saturday, February 13, 2021. He’ll be presenting Finite State Machines for Functional Software Machinery, we hope you can attend!
Finite state machines (FSMs) are one of the simplest models of computation, but it’s this simplicity that makes them so useful. They are expressive enough to cover a wide range of practical problems while remaining easy to reason about. I believe they should be more widely used, and the only reason they aren’t is because many developers only know them in the context of a dusty theory of computation course. This talk sets out to change this!
I’ll first (re)introduce finite state machines as a model of computation. I’ll show that they are very simple, which makes them easy to understand and therefore create and debug. We’ll then see how finite state machines appear just about everywhere. We’ll see examples in the Scala standard library, and in application code from web services and user interfaces. We’ll finish by discussing implementation techniques and further applications.