---
title: "Scalar 2017: A Comprehensive Review of the Scala Conference Experience"
description: "Scalar Conference 2017 — everything I liked"
author: "Bartosz Mikulski"
author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\""
author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/
author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz
canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/scalar-2017
---

I can either spend next three hours writing a 600-word long text or just quickly write a list of all the talks I liked, download a new dataset from Kaggle and play with it. It is easy to choose, isn’t it? ;)

## Talks I liked

**Tracing Akka Streams** (<a href="https://twitter.com/raam86">Raam Rosh Hai</a>)<br/>
A great tool! The speaker was probably a little bit afraid of speaking in front of the audience, but it does not matter. His project is exactly what I was looking for.

**Real-time anomaly detection made easy** (<a href="https://twitter.com/guzik_io">Piotr Guzik</a>)<br/>
That was a quick win, I love everything related to data science and machine learning ;)

**Machine learning by example — workshop** (<a href="https://twitter.com/mmatloka">Michał Matłoka</a>)<br/>
It was fun, even though I have not learnt anything new.

**Kontextfrei: a new approach to testable Spark applications** (<a href="https://twitter.com/kaffeecoder">Daniel Westheide</a>)<br/>
Solves my problem, that is enough for me ;)

**Building a real-time auction engine using event sourcing** (<a href="https://twitter.com/acjay">Alan Johnson</a>)<br/>
That is why we attend conferences, to hear a good story, something based on real-life experience.

**Carpenters and cartographers** (<a href="https://twitter.com/ValentinKasas">Valentin Kasas</a>)<br/>
Selling domain driven design in a very metaphorical way. Also Valentin was not afraid to criticize The Gang of Four and the design patterns. I appreciate that because sometimes I feel we have too much dogma in IT.

**Lambda core — hardcore** (<a href="https://twitter.com/jarek000000">Jarosław Ratajski</a>)<br/>
Pure awesomeness. Wizards, rainbows, unicorns, and lambdas.

## The most important thing

For me Scalar was a “combo-breaker”. I was disappointed with the last 3–4 IT conferences I had attended. Usually when someone asked about my opinion, I was saying: “If I had bought the ticket with my own money, I would be outraged”.

Scalar is different. I highly recommend attending the next edition.