Building a Company on Scala
summary
Company chooses Scala in 2010 and grows to ~200 people, running 20+ PB of data and selling for $360 million, claiming Scala provides the technical foundation to scale. Engineering builds services with Play, Unfiltered, Akka and HTTP clients (Dispatch/Ning), learns hard lessons: overusing Akka actors and ad hoc reimplements (cookie parser) cause bugs and CPU issues, mixing blocking drivers kills reactive gains, and futures/backpressure create sharp pitfalls. Functional mastery isn’t required; enforce opinionated frameworks and refactor patterns as teams grow.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 3:10You Need a FRAMEWORK
- 5:27A Framework is a Formalization of Patterns and Best Practices It's Necessary to Stay Productive
- 8:28There are Few Frameworks in Scala-Land Toolkits rule the Scala domain
- 9:53Constructing a Framework Because you have to
- 10:45"FP" Mastery is not Required to Master Scala Scala is not Java, but it's also not Haskell
- 11:47Don't Let The Possibilities Intimidate or Seduce You
- 12:48You Want To Apply Scala
- 13:37Tools and Toolkits are Means to an End Eager awareness, careful adoption Everything has trade-offs
- 16:33Reactive and Async vs Sync Make a fim decision early, midde-ground does not work
- 22:24Premature and One-Off Abstractions
- 30:45Don't Leave It to a Single Developer
- 32:19Let The Tools Fade Into The Background Spend more time on higher level design
- 33:23Train, Explain, Scrutinize, Evolve As a team and community
