Confessions of a Ruby Developer Whose Heart Was Stolen by Scala

Bio: Long-time Ruby developer who recently made the switch to Scala. Currently a backend Scala developer at Quantifind in the Bay Area. Creator of the popular "redis_failover" project that provides automatic failover for Redis on top of ZooKeeper.

Ruby has a long history of "making the developer happy" by allowing for ease of programming and prototyping. Rails has taken off by storm and allowed startup companies to quickly create web applications that solve features required by the business. However, recently the Ruby community has realized that scaling Ruby in the real world can be a challenge due to the lack of type safety, the global interpreter lock, lack of a robust threading library, and the general lack of focus on performance in the Ruby world.

In this talk my goal will be to illustrate how I've made the transition from the dynamic programming world of Ruby to the type safe and highly async/concurrent world of Scala and Akka. I think that Ruby developers shy away from Scala due to its static type safety and lack of understanding of its powerful and expressive features. I want to illustrate how Scala does a much better job at allowing the developer to be expressive while avoiding common pitfalls with Ruby (e.g., Ruby's dynamic mixins vs. Scala's type safe trait mixins). I will use examples from my own redis_failover project and illustrate how using Scala could've saved me at times.

The Ruby/Rails community currently has a huge force behind it, and I think that some of these users will make the transition to Scala/Akka/Play with the proper illustrative comparisons and knowledge.