Last night I was the speaker at Seattle’s Scala meetup, Scala at the Sea. The topic was “Functional Programming Demystification”:

Functional programming is full of Fancy Words™. Let's collect a list of them to demystify together. Adam will facilitate with live-coding, and will also try to make good jokes.

Here’s some terms to bootstrap us: effect, free monad, functor, property-based testing, refinement type, stream, etc.

We will have plenty of time for Q&A during this session.

I also shared our newly available public course, Essential Effects, with the group.

We didn’t get to all of the terms we collected, but we did cover functor, monad, and effects, with a side-topic about typeclasses, before we ran out of time.

I’ve posted my notes and code on Github.

We’ve moved online via Zoom for our monthly gatherings, and it was good to reconnect with everyone there. However, as a speaker it is really difficult to talk to an audience you can’t see, and having only Q&A and text-based chat to interact is very frustrating. I hope we as a community can find more interactive ways of gathering together. We need to at least see each other’s faces!