Our own Jamie Allen recently travelled to South America to spend time with the amazing Typesafe developer community while attending conferences and meetups. He shared an awesome write up of his travels below! Thanks, Jamie for sharing...
--
I had the good fortune to spend two weeks in June down in South America, meeting with users while doing some consulting and training work for a client. It was an amazing trip that truly reflects the enthusiasm and global reach of Play Framework, Akka, and Scala.
My first stop was Buenos Aires, Argentina. I spent three consecutive nights that week giving talks to meetup groups. On the first day, I talked about Lambdas with the Argentina Java User Group. They call the group JUGAR - I love that name, since it means "to play" in Spanish, which I think is very appropriate! Afterward, the group members took me out to a wonderful dinner almost entirely consisting of meat. What a wonderful time, and thanks so much to MuleSoft for hosting the event.
The next night, I spoke at a meetup of the Buenos Aires High Scalability Group, discussing Effective Actors and best practices for Akka development. This was a high-energy group very focused on large deployments, and they had outstanding questions. Afterwards, they took me out to dinner for more meat. Thanks to Zauber for hosting my talk.
On the third night, I was fortunate to be the speaker at the inaugural meetup of the Scala User Group of Argentina (SUGAR for short, another great name!). I presented the Real World Akka Recipes talk that I co-delivered at Scala Days with Björn Antonsson and Patrik Nordwall. I also demonstrated how Typesafe Activator can be used to facilitate learning and getting started with patterns of Play, Akka and Scala development. It was another really great meetup, and afterwards we went out and ate a lot of meat. Thanks to SCV for hosting the event.
The next evening, I traveled to Montevideo, Uruguay - a short ferry ride away from Buenos Aires. There I met with a wonderfully enthusiastic group from Scala Meetup Montevideo, willing to forgo an important football match to hear me speak. The group has some really great laptop stickers, and big thanks to Gabriel Claramunt for facilitating my travel as I was having lots of issues trying to purchase the ferry ticket with a foreign credit card. I talked about Lambdas, Real World Akka Patterns and showed how to use the Typesafe Activator as well. Afterwards, we went out for a delicious dinner of meat. Thanks to Globant for hosting the event.
What an incredible trip I've had, and thank you to everyone in the Argentina and Uruguay meetup groups for coming out and making this so much fun. I will now go on a strict vegetarian diet.
Just kidding...
