Almost Zen: Reflections on Four Years of Scala in Practice

Our team at StackMob (and now PayPal) started using Scala in the early 2.9.x days and we thought we had mastered it. We had not. Fast forward to today, we're four years, three Scala versions, lots of hiring, and an acquisition later. All of these things have impacted the way we build systems in Scala. We’ll explore this evolution with actual code samples pulled from our git history to highlight our move from writing Java (in Scala) to Haskell (in Scala) to a happy medium. We’ll discuss code clarity in the context of Scala and the way we evolve our style guidelines in order to maintain consistency throughout our codebases and why it’s important. Most importantly, we’ll highlight the errors we made so that others may avoid them.

Authors:
Andrew Harris
Andrew has worked on backend services with Scala at StackMob and PayPal for three years. Before this, he studied human-computer interaction and social computing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with research in crowd engagement, aphasia and empathy, and autism in children.

Alex Yakushev
Alex Yakushev has over 10 years of experience with production code on the JVM, from simple web apps to huge backend services. For the last four years Alex has been focused on creating great Scala services at StackMob and later PayPal.