Advanced Scala: Implicits

First draft of my Implicits lecture.

For about the last 3-4 years I’ve been on a journey that wouldn’t have started if it were for a series of presentations in my local Austin “Scala Enthusiasts” meetup, starting with one where I was first introduced to the concept of “implicits”.

Now, years later, and after reading several books and scratching my head and butting it into walls a whole bunch, I’ve been feeling the desire to create a lecture aimed for the person I was at the very beginning of the journey. You see, I feel like a lot of time I knew I wanted to understand these interesting things… monads and monoids and typeclasses, but I lacked some sort of roadmap that put everything together. I would be grasping at drips and drabs of concepts, but I felt like I was lacking a sort of map that would help me understand where I was headed and where some of the traps and esoteric syntax were all about.

The above video weighs in at 1 hour 25 minutes, and it’s my first attempt to deliver the first of a planned two lectures. I’m planning on re-recording this (having stumbled and mumbled through the first dry run here) and I might break it into a few smaller parts. But rather than letting the “perfect be the enemy of the good” I’m just going to post this now.

Also, here are the slides in PDF form:

Advanced_Scala_Implicits_reduced

Author: Murray Todd Williams

I live in Austin, Texas. I'm enthusiastic about food, wine, programming (especially Scala), tennis and politics. I've worked for Accenture for over 12 years where I'm a Product Manager for suite of analytical business applications.