Meet the Speaker, Anthony Cros
May 10th, 2023
Anthony Cros is an independent software engineer/architect with 20 years of professional coding experience. He focuses on data transformations (especially big data), domain modeling, software architecture in general, and bioinformatics.
Anthony’s past experiences primarily include work in the biomedical field, with positions held at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the BF2I lab (INSA Lyon), and the bacteriology lab at UCBL (Lyon). He also worked in the telecom industry for a short period.
At Scala Days Seattle he will present the talk “Gallia: A Schema-Aware Library for Practical Data Transformation in Scala,” describing what Gallia is, how to use it, and why one might want to use it; especially in contrast with alternative tools such as Pandas or Apache Spark on its own. Anthony will briefly discuss the internal workings of the library, notably its underlying two Directed Acyclic Graphs, which process the schema and data respectively. He will also perform some live coding in order to showcase more involved use cases, for small and big data. This presentation will conclude with a discussion of the library’s strengths (and weaknesses), some of its latest and exciting new features (such as support for Avro/Parquet), and its future direction.
We asked Anthony some questions about what he’s looking forward to and what you can take away from his presentation:
What are you most looking forward to at Scala Days this year?
I’m excited to resume in-person meeting, get direct feedback about my tool, and obviously learn some new skills myself!
What can attendees expect to learn during your talk session?
I will cover the basics of Gallia of course, but I will also do some live coding, and delve into complex examples that I believe illustrate Gallia’s raison d’etre.
What is a contribution to the Scala community that you are particularly proud or fond of?
If from me: Gallia and Aptus (utilities lib) of course!
If from others: I find tools from Haoyi Li and Shadaj Laddad to be incredibly useful and on point, both have created more than one tool I’ve used and enjoyed before (in particular UPickle/UTest and ScalaPy/Slinky). Impressive.
You can find Anthony at Scala Days Seattle and on Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub.
Book your tickets today to meet Anthony and more amazing experts at Scala Days Seattle!