Scala's effectiveness in rapid-prototyping is only one of the properties that make it a fantastic tool for eviscerating Git's guts. Taking advantage of the others allowed The BFG (an alternative to git-filter-branch, written in Scala) to outperform the native ‘git-filter-branch' command by a factor of 50x or more - turning an overnight job into one that takes less than 5 minutes.

This talk will share experiences from building The BFG (successfully prototyped in a single high-stakes journey on the London Underground), highlight properties of Scala that made it possible, and explain the reformed-alcoholic pattern of user behavior.

oberto Tyley is the author of Agit (the Git client for Android devices) and The BFG Repo-Cleaner (a faster, simpler alternative to git-filter-branch), a software developer at The Guardian, and contributor to various open-source projects. He's worked at GitHub, 'invented' animated diffs, and loves explaining things.

Videos available on www.parleys.com.

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