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Scala Central: Functional Design Patterns in Scala

Video recording of a talk I gave on functional programming at a Scala Central meetup.

Jun 6, 2018 - 1 min read
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Functional Design Patterns in Scala: 3. Monads

Learning (and subsequently trying to explain) monads has become something of a rite of passage in functional programming. Burrito analogies aside, the most helpful description I have come across is given by Noel Welsh and Dave Gurnell in Scala with Cats:

“A monad is a mechanism for sequencing computations.”

Dec 30, 2017 - 5 min read
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Functional Design Patterns in Scala: 2. Lenses

Case classes provide a convenient way of working with immutable objects in scala. Manipulating fields within them can be tedious, however. In this post, we will look at how lenses can be used to abstract over this complexity while preserving the benefits of immutability.

Jun 24, 2017 - 4 min read
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Functional Design Patterns in Scala: 1. Monoids

Monoids are used to describe an aggregation pattern: whenever we need to combine values of a particular type, a monoid instance helps abstract the mechanics of the aggregation from the program’s business logic. In this post, we will use the LCD Digits kata that we tackled previously as a motivating example for applying this pattern. The goal here is to transform a sequence of input digits into a string resembling their representation on an LCD display.

May 30, 2017 - 5 min read