Community Coding Workshop in Scala
This past month we had our most successful NY Scala Meetup yet. And we didn’t have any fancy speakers or mind blowing presentations. We didn’t even have talks at all.
Instead, we built something. In the course of two hours we built a working image processing service with a web front-end. It stores images in MongoDB and transforms them using its own interface to Image Magick or with the Java image manipulation primitives.
In preparation for the meetup, we asked development team leaders to volunteer on the event planning page and made them into “event hosts”. Then we created the repository in our group’s github organization and put in some stub code for the different teams.
The idea with the stub code was to have a starting point for each of the different teams. There was one source module for each team, and interfaces between the different modules were already defined. This allowed teams to start working right away and test their changes against the stub code in the other modules.
It was up to the leaders to figure out how to run their teams based on the particular tasks and Scala experience of the team members. They all came up with different, successful methods.
The Mongo team had the best setup for instruction, with their own projector in the front of the room. This allowed everyone to see the changes that Brendan McAdams was making as he talked about them.
The Image Magick team had many different people pushing code. Jorge Ortiz led them to produce an impressive abstraction for working with the external process, given the extreme time constraints.
Chris League’s team slayed the BufferedImage dragon as he directed them from a relaxed position. (Just kidding, Chris! Correct me in the comments.)
The API team had a lot of people with web API experience and ideas about the best interface to build; Chris Lewis worked them through the options for realizing those interfaces in Unfiltered.
And finally, Doug Tangren’s web front end team made everything actually work in a browser. For the first half hour or so he taught them the fundamentals of Unfiltered, then they raced to integrate everything with the API team.
After the allotted time expired (and maybe a few minutes more), we had demos. Each team lead explained what they had produced and whatever interesting Scala-isms they had encountered on the way.
While different groups were demoing, Doug was working furiously off stage to get all the different parts working together. It was getting late, the pizza was cold, the beer was… beer. Jorge and I started ad libbing about god knows what Scala topic. I was prepared to say that just having the parts work separately was a real accomplishment.
But at the last minute Doug made that face people make when something compiles and actually works too, so we plugged him into the projector and celebrated making something that works, together.
When we say this was the most successful meetup, it’s not just that we got a great feeling while we were there. The reviews posted to the site were excellent, and moving. It says a lot about what people are looking for in Scala, and programing in general.
This meetup really reignited my enthusiasm for the language and this community. … There is nothing more empowering then being able to build something in a new language.
I am really happy with events like this because having a semi structured group project or goal is one of the best ways to learn as a beginner.
Outstanding meetup. Smart, friendly people who were very willing to share their time.
We’ll be doing more of these, no doubt about it. But what we most hope to do by sharing this experience is encourage others to do the same thing. If you have a Scala meetup group, do this. It’s easier than you think.
If you don’t have a meetup group, start one. You will get members. People want to learn Scala, they just don’t know where to begin. Give them some space and a little direction—they will teach each other more than they could learn from a hundred dread monad blog posts.
