Patryk Jażdżewski

In this post, I will try to share with you all a functional pattern I stumbled upon recently – Tagless Final. This pattern tries to address a vital problem for every software engineer: how to make sure the programs we write are correct? I will try to explain how Tagless Final works and how it […]

Seasoned speakers have a saying “there are two groups of people: those who use speaking skills to improve their lives and those who are too scared to seize the opportunity”. I think it hits the mark. Communication skills are in high demand in every industry, from marketing to IT. For us, developers, good communication and […]

In this post, we will discuss Each Library. Each allows Scala users to write imperative syntax, which is later on translated into scalaz monadic expressions. In a way, it’s adding syntactic sugar on top of ordinary Scala. Simplicity and the way it extends ordinary code caught my attention, so I’ve decided to dig deeper. This […]

During our last internal Backend Guild meeting we discussed the topic of Apache Spark. This post is to fill the details we missed and to organize the knowledge so it might be useful for people willing to start with Spark.

Hi. In this post, we will be exploring some unexpected gotchas we found while working with Scala. Hopefully, it will help you to better understand Scala and fix some naughty bugs :)

The Problem In my previous post we have written a simple app with Scala.js. In the end we managed to do everything we wanted to, but as we added more and more code a problem appeared – state management, the real app killer. Although our app didn’t do anything advanced, state handling and UI updates forced us […]

What is Scala.js? Scala.js is a compiler that targets JavaScript, unlike the traditional Scala compiler which targets JVM bytecode. What it means in practice – with Scala.js you can write Scala code that will be executed in the browser.

The challenge In Scalac we view remote work as a challenge not as a hindrance. In many companies working remotely, from home or even from another town, is a taboo. No manager there would allow that. They justify it with “decreased productivity” and “difficult communication”. And they are right … as long as we talk […]

Motivation In Scalac we believe that communication is essential in IT and that projects with inefficient information sharing are doomed to fail. Fortunately for us it doesn’t always mean that putting people in one place is the only way. More often it’s about creating the right spirit for exchanging knowledge and providing ways to do […]

What is STM? Wikipedia defines it as follows: software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It is an alternative to lock-based synchronization. Hmmm… but what does it mean in practice?

Scala end to end In Scalac we believe that Scala is a great general-purpose language, that helps you to build high-quality software quickly. And although Scala shines in the backend, its use is not limited to server-side programming. With these blog posts, we would also like to convince all of you that it’s possible to […]

Scala is well known as a concise, readable programming language. One of the reasons is that many popular libraries offer their users DSLs to work with. These convenient APIs make creating programs simpler by saving our keystrokes and (most importantly) by improving readability. But it’s not always the case … Sometimes we have to work […]

When considering web application development with Scala you probably think about the Play! framework. It’s a great tool for creating fully fledged enterprise grade applications, but creating something big isn’t always necessary. Sometimes you need something easy that allows for fast time-to-market. I stumbled into this problem some time ago when doing prototyping and Skinny saved me […]

Hi. Specs2 is one of the most popular Scala libraries for testing, but definitely not a simple one. That’s why I’ve decided to create a blog post with a few tricks on how to make working with Specs2 much easier. The examples are 100% artificial, but their purpose is only to demonstrate the capabilities of Specs2.