This blog post discusses the introduction of the query library. Why it is needed, what it brings to the table over the many existing database query libraries in the Scala ecosystem, and what makes it fit nicely into the "Executable Scala Pseudocode that's Easy, Boring, and Fast ..read more

In this post, we'll explore Mill is such an intuitive build tool. We'll get familiar with Mill, do a deep dive into the core ideas of what Mill is all about, and finally discuss how these core design decisions build up to a surprisingly intuitive and flexible user experience that is much more than the sum of its parts ..read more

Python has a reputation as "Executable Pseudocode": code that fits just as easily on a whiteboard during a discussion, as it does in a codebase deploying to production. Scala is a language that can be just as concise a pseudocode as Python, and arguably better at the "executable" part: faster, safer, and with better tooling. This blog post will explore how the Scala libraries from the ecosystem allows the use of Scala as Executable Pseudocode, due to their unique design philosophy that stands out amongst the rest of the Scala ecosystem ..read more

Last year I wrote and self-published my first technical book . It has gone on to be relatively successful, selling thousands copies, both digital and physical. This blog post will explore how the process of writing and publishing went: from its inception, to writing, editing, and finally publishing in multiple formats and mediums ..read more

This is a bit of change from the normal programming content on this blog, but given that my job is a programming job, writing lots of Scala, I suppose it still fits ..read more

Web and API servers are the backbone of internet systems: they provide the basic interface for computers to interact over a network, especially at the boundary between different companies and organizations. This tutorial will teach you the basics of setting up a simple HTTP server in Scala to serve Web and API requests, and walk you through a complete example of building a simple real-time chat website serving both HTML web pages and JSON API endpoints ..read more

Most modern systems are backed by relational databases. This tutorial will walk you through the basis of using a relational database from Scala, using the Quill query library. We will work through small self-contained examples of how to store and query data within a Postgres database, and finish with converting an interactive chat website to use a Postgres database for data storage ..read more

Not every website exposes their data through a JSON API: in many cases the HTML page shown to users is all you get. This tutorial will walk you through using Scala to scrape useful information from human-readable HTML pages, unlocking the ability to programmatically extract data from online websites or services that were never designed for programmatic access via an API ..read more

The Scala language, following its Java heritage, allows you to compare any two values for equality regardless of their respective types. This can be very error prone, since a refactor that changes the type of one of your values may silently result in an equality check that can never return true. This blog post explores how a "safer" equality check is just one of many features that go against the principles that underlie any type system with subtyping, and achieving it requires a fundamental re-thinking of what it means to be "type safe ..read more

This post will walk through some of the core inference techniques within an optimizing compiler: how to model a program in a way that is easy to work with, infer facts about your program, and using those facts to make your program smaller and faster ..read more