Many applications today are built with Web technologies. The reason is simple: everyone has a browser installed on their machine. Moreover, even though there are different browsers, they all follow common specifications. Everything is based on the triplet HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Therefore, there is often very little work needed to adapt to…

A while back, I was happy to discover that Heroku allowed one to host, completely for free, a small application on their dynos. Recently, though, I was less happy to learn that they were decommissioning them, so that people were asked to update to paid plans. Fortunately, one alternative immediately…

These last years, the trend has been to export web technologies out of the browser, into the desktop (e.g., electron) and more and more into Mobile Applications (e.g., Ionic). Whether or not we like this trend, it is in any case a bargain for any technology that can produce HTML…

A while ago, I watched a talk from Netflix from the Scala days 2019, and the speaker Jeremy Smith said that a Scala program is actually made of two programs. The one that everybody knows, but also the one which happens at “compile time”. When we (at least I) think…

Those following my blog posts know that I like to take Scala everywhere. This time, let us write Angular services in Scala. If you don’t know Angular, it’s a frontend web framework developed by Google in TypeScript, similar to React or Vue. It is a component based framework, and to…

Not so long ago I was thinking “how is it not possible in 2020 to have a free (crappy) host for a JVM based server with a (potentially also crappy) database?”. And then I discovered Heroku. Heroku gives you the opportunity to host for free a server with a small…

Introduction If you are a Python developer, perhaps you ever felt the need to step up your Django application, or your data pipeline, to the next level, towards a technology which allows to build larger, safer and more robust softwares. It turns out that Scala is an excellent fit to these…

Recently we stumbled on a problem that at first glance looks particularly simple: overload a method for a `List[String]` and a `List[Int]`. One could expect that simply writing def foo(ls: List[String]): Unit = ??? def foo(ls: List[Int]): Unit = ??? would do the trick, the same way as we would…

It is stating the obvious to say that nowadays, Data Science (DS) is dominated by python (with R being a decent challenger). It is however arguably not the best for Data Engineering (1), where more robust languages such as Scala tend to shine more. As we shall see, though, Scala…