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Graham Tackley, Architect at guardian.co.uk.

Graham Tackley

Biography: Graham Tackley

Graham Tackley is an architect at guardian.co.uk. He spent a few years leading the Web Platform Team engineering guardian.co.uk to scale to ever increasing demand - currently over 60 million unique browsers visit every month. More recently, he's been helping evolve the platform to enable reader engagement in new and innovative ways, and enabling the development team to deliver better solutions faster. He led the implementation of the Guardian's unique Open Platform Content API which provides access to all of the Guardian's current and historical web content.

Presentation: Scala: simplifying development at guardian.co.uk

Track: The Rise of Scala & Functional Programming / Time: Friday 13:50 - 14:50 / Location: Fleming

In 2008, guardian.co.uk completed migration of the core website on to a traditional open source java stack. Although this worked well, we became progressively dissatisfied with the rate at which we could innovate on this platform. After some largely unsatisfactory experiments with Python and Django, in 2009 a few of us decided to implement our new Content API in Scala. Today, all new jvm-hosted projects are implemented in Scala, and we're progressively converting many of the older ones.

This practical talk tells the story of why we made these decisions, why we settled on Scala and why - and how - we rolled it out to the whole team. We'll explore the impact that Scala has on our development efforts today, showing how using a supposedly more complex language has made our development lives simpler.