I recently updated Noel’s Essential Essential Scala workshop (E2S) and did a run through of it at Hack the Tower. Thanks to Andy Hicks of the London Scala User Group for hooking me up, and to John Stevenson and the Hack the Tower team for hosting me.
Here’s a photo as proof. The view from the 27th floor of the Heron Tower was simultaneously amazing and terrifying, as were the turbo lifts (which were on the outside of the building):
E2S is something Noel put together for a workshop at Devoxx 2013 – a three hour crash course in Scala for programmers of all backgrounds. Hack the Tower was a little more leisurely – we took about five hours and skipped some of the last section. The content is based on our commercial Essential Scala course, which teaches as much about developing a functional programming mindset as it does writing Scala code.
The material went down well with the crowd, who had a diverse background of Java, Python, PHP, and other languages. I got some nice feedback at the end, too – here’s an example (thanks Ruth – cheque’s in the post):
Great @londonscala meetup at #salesforce today with generous all-day hands-on #Scala training from guru @davegurnell of @underscoreuk!
— Ruth Stryker (@ruthstryker) October 18, 2014Noel and I plan on re-using E2S to promote Scala for free at any conferences and meetups we can. We’ve even open sourced the content and the exercises on Github. I’m convinced that I can get it back down to three hours with a little editing and swapping around. Contact us on Twitter if you’d like us to come and talk about Scala in your area.