Meet Seattle’s Keynote Speakers
May 19th, 2023
Scala Days Seattle is coming up soon on June 5-7 (workshop June 4-5). Across all three conference days, we are excited to welcome four astounding keynote speakers. Our opening keynote speaker is Paweł Marks from VirtusLab on the evening of June 5th. Daniel Spiewak from the Walt Disney Company on the evening of June 6th. Last but certainly not least, on June 7th, Denny Lee and Ginger Holt from Databricks.
Paweł Marks is involved in shaping the future of Scala 3 as a member of the Scala Improvement Process Committee and as a leader of the compiler team at VirtusLab in Krakow, Poland. Having been involved as a developer and architect in JVM tooling for many years, in 2020, he returned to Scala – his favorite language from college – and became part of the compiler team shortly after. He is now mainly responsible for the Scala release cycle and helping other compiler developers.
At Scala Days Seattle, Paweł will present the talk “State of Scala.”
You can find Paweł at Scala Days Seattle on June 5th and on Twitter and GitHub.
Daniel Spiewak is a software developer based out of Boulder, CO. Over the years, he has worked with Scala, Java, Ruby, Haskell, C/C++, SML, Clojure, and countless other languages, covering topics ranging from type theory, compiler and language design, globally distributed systems, JVM optimization, data structures, mechanical sympathy, and much more.
He currently spends most of his free time maintaining the Cats Effect project and continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible at the intersection of mathematical laws and highly scalable production implementations.
At Scala Days Seattle, Daniel will present the talk “Micro-Optimization for Fun and Profit.” This talk aims to peel back the curtain on some of the general patterns and ideas behind micro-optimization on the JVM. While Cats Effect IO is used as a running practical example, this is not a Cats Effect-specific talk, nor even a discussion of functional programming! Instead, this talk focuses on the fundamentals of how the JVM works, how hardware works, how the Scala compiler works, and how we can exploit this knowledge when needed to write dramatically faster code without sacrificing functionality.
You can find Daniel at Scala Days Seattle on June 6th and on Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub.
Denny is a Databricks Developer Advocate. A hands-on distributed systems and data sciences engineer with extensive experience developing internet-scale data platforms, and predictive analytics systems. He also has a Master of Biomedical Informatics from Oregon Health and Sciences University and has implemented powerful data solutions for enterprise Healthcare customers. His current technical focuses include Distributed Systems, Apache Spark, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Genomics.
Ginger Holt is a Senior Staff Data Scientist at Databricks. She develops forecasting and predictive models for revenue, sales, capacity, and other business planning needs. She obtained her Ph.D. in Statistics from Rice University, where her research was in multivariate time series analysis. She was an Assistant Professor of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia from 2005-2009, where she researched multivariate time series methodology development. She has researched prediction methodologies in many different applications, including computational finance, retail, capacity planning, environmental networks, cyber security, ecology, and econometrics. She has also worked at Meta, Walmart Labs, and HP, forecasting capacity needs and demand, and at BP as a quantitative analyst developing forecasting methodologies used in technical trading strategies.
At Scala Days Seattle, Denny and Ginger will present the talk “Use Spark from Anywhere: A Spark Client in Scala Powered by Spark Connect.” This talk highlights how simple it is to connect to Spark using Spark Connect from any data applications or IDEs. We showcase how we build the Scala client for Spark Connect that integrates with the server and attempts to solve one of Spark’s hardest problems the clients’ application isolation from the server. We will do a deep dive into the architecture of Spark Connect and give an outlook of how the community can participate in the extension of Spark Connect for new programming languages and frameworks - to bring the power of Spark everywhere.
You can find Denny and Ginger at Scala Days Seattle on June 7th. Denny can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub. Ginger is on LinkedIn and GitHub.
Book your tickets today to meet each keynote speaker and many more amazing experts at Scala Days Seattle!