Lagos Scala Meetup III : A Recap

Introduction

Lagos Scala meetup group began with a mission to promote excellence in Scala software craftsmanship in Nigeria. So far, we have had three meetings. To know more (values, mission, goals etc) about our meetup group you can check out this presentation by Ikenna Nwaiwu one of our organizers.

Assuming you don’t know about the awesomeness of Scala, you can learn more about Scala from this presentation by Ogbajie Ikenna — Co-organizer.

Presentations

There were 3 presentations at this meetup

Ikenna Nwaiwu presenting

1. “Choosing a Technology Stack for your Business Solution” — Obinna Okafor
2. “Lagos Scala Meetup — Mission, Values, Strategy” — Ikenna Nwaiwu
3. Scala Fundamentals: “Scala Expressions, Control Structures and Objects” by Ikenna Nwaiwu
4. “Higher Order Functions” by Kabir Idris

The first presentation was a talk by Obinna Okafor on choosing a technology stack, he presented the important questions and considerations that need to be made in choosing a stack for a business or hobby project. Ikenna Nwaiwu presented next and talked about the mission, values and strategy of the meetup group. The meetup organizers felt having this talk helps keep things in perspective and guides new members to better understand the direction of the group. Slides for the other presentations are provided.

Insights

We had some people attending for the first time and from the discussions we had with them, we got some interesting information:

• Data analytics and Big Data seems to be driving the use of Scala here in Nigeria. We noticed most persons were interested in using Scala for Apache Spark.

• There was a higher percentage of beginners to full-time users of the language.

Lessons learnt

We have been learning lessons and improving on the meetup since we began. A few lessons we learnt at this event:

1. Less talk and more coding :

From the feedback we got from the attendees, the coding sessions were the highlight for most of them. We had a session that involved setting up your coding environment, cloning a repo and running a few tests. This session helped most beginners because starting out is usually the hardest.

*Peer* Coding Sessions

So this means we would probably have fewer presentations and more time for coding at our next meetup.

2. Come with dependencies :

Thanks to the slow network connection, setting up for most persons took quite some time (maven downloading the internet). A suggestion we received was to come with dependencies in a drive and share to others which would improve setup time.

The meetup was an interesting experience for most of our new members. We continued the discussions in our meetup Whats App group. The cloned repo contained a challenge which members were supposed to solve using Scala. We believe partaking in challenges would give the members a better experience of the language than only attending meetings.

We are awesome !!

We hope to have more interesting and impactful meetups moving forward. If you are interested, you can join our meetup group to get notified of our next meeting. You can also follow us on Twitter @LagosScala. One of the meetup organizers is holding an introductory Scala course .Contact him if you are interested.

Thanks to our sponsors (Hotels.ng, Ikenna Consulting) for making Lagos Scala Meetup awesome. We also like to thank Osioke - Community manager at Devcenter for encouraging us to write this recap.