SF Scala, James Earl Douglas: Putting Functional Programming to Work
ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us!
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Frequently among the benefits claimed of functional programming are promises of safety, composability, and reusability, but it is often difficult to connect these ideas with production code solving real-world problems. In this session, we dig into one particular tool: the state monad, to see how it lives up to these promises and helps power the Versal platform.
A programmer passionate about continuous learning, inspiring the joy of teaching, and keeping just outside of his comfort zone, James helps build the Scala backend of the Versal platform. When not knee-deep in type theory, he can be found riding his bicycle.