Tooling Talks

Welcome to a new year of Tooling Talks. I'm your host Chris and I'm excited to welcome you back to a new year of exciting interviews all about Tooling in the Scala Ecosystem. I've got some great guests lined up for this year, some great topics in the works, and maybe even some projects relating to Scala tooling that I'm excited to share with you. Our first guest of 2022 is one that I've worked with in open source for a couple years now. He's currently leading the charge of developing Metals and many of the other libraries and tooling that Metals relies on. Most of you out there listening are probably relying on something he's actively maintaining in the Scalameta ecosystem. We had a great conversation about getting involved in tooling, playing the role of a firefighter, and about some interesting new features in Metals. Without further ado, let's dive in and learn from Tomasz. Thanks for joining.

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Welcome to another episode of Tooling Talks, I'm your host Chris Kipp and I'm excited to share another interview with you this month. Whether or not you're familiar with it, if you're a Scala developer more than likely somewhere in your tool chain you're using Coursier. It's almost a no brainer that in the Scala ecosystem if you need to resolve some dependencies, quickly install a scala program, or quickly see the dependency tree of an artifact, it's the tool to use. That's why I'm so excited to sit with Alex Archambault this month and chat about all the tooling he's worked on from Coursier, Ammonite, Almond, and most recently scala-cli. Alex has had a tremendous impact on how all Scala developers get started with Scala, and has written arguably some of the most widely used tools in the Scala ecosystem, even if you're unaware you're relying on them. Without further ado, let's dive in. Thanks for joining.

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If you've been listening to the show for a while you'll have heard the name Unison pop up a few times. Unison aims to reimagine how many aspects of programming languages work, which can also radically challenge the status quo of developer tooling. This month it was joy to sit down with Rebecca Mark and talk all about how approaching development through unison is a totally new experience. Everything from tracking changes in your code, how your code is stored, and how you write your code is new. She has some great insight into what the future of developer tooling could look like using Unison. We also had an opportunity to speak a bit about the advantages of an early focus on community, diversity, and education in a language community, like Unison. Thanks for joining, let's dive in.

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Welcome to tooling talks, where every month I sit down with someone working in tooling, learn how they got there, and gain some insight into the work they do. This month I had the privilege to sit down with Guillaume Martres, one of the core contributors on the Dotty team from EPFL and chat all about the Scala 3 compiler and what it means to have interactivity in mind when working on a compiler in regards to tooling. We talked about the importance of upstreaming changes, de-duplicating efforts, and also a bit about what the future of tooling
could look like in Scala thanks to things like TASTy. It was a pleasure chatting with Guillaume, so I hope you enjoy the show.

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This month I had the pleasure to sit down with Euguene Yokota and talk about some fascinating topics that range from coding on the weekend with friends, to being a maintainer of one of the most widely used tools in the Scala ecosystem, to the importance of diversity and inclusion in order for Scala not only to grow, but to maintain the numbers it has. You may know Eugene from being the maintainer of sbt, the tremendous amount of work he's put into Scala build tooling, his blog that has a great mix of music, food, and technology posts, or from his herding cats series. After years at Lightbend Eugene is now a developer at Twitter working full time on Engineering Effectiveness via build tools like Bazel. It was an absolute pleasure to welcome him to the show.

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If you're a Scala developer there is almost no doubt you use either IntelliJ or
Metals with your editor of choice. Whether you're using IntelliJ, or Metals
which utilizes BSP, or maybe even IntelliJ with BSP, you're using some of the
handy work of Justin. This month Justin and I sit and chat all about IntelliJ
and Scala, the Build Server Protocol, and what some of the future of programming
could look like in Scala.  I'm pretty fascinated with this topic lately and
looking at the current limitations we have in the Scala tooling ecosystem, and
thinking about how they could be challenged. I'm grateful that Justin took the
time and chat and also grateful for all the work he's put into making
integrations in Scala tooling seamless.

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A question I'm sure many Scala developers and companies are asking themselves
this year is "how can we migrate our applications to Scala 3?". A fantastic tool
to help with this is Scala3-migrate, which will help with migrating your
scalacOptions, ensuring your dependencies are published for Scala 3, and even
helping to automatically re-write parts of your code. In this interview I chat
with Meriam and her work on Scala3-migrate, the challenges you might encounter
as you're migrating your code, and about some of the things developers may not
think about as they set out to update to Scala 3. We'll also dive into her work
on Scalafix which unlocked the first Scalafix integration in Metals, the Scala
Language Sever, as well as helped with rewrites for Scala3. We had a great
conversation, and super thankful she took the time to chat about the works she's
been doing, getting into tooling, and other untapped areas in the ecosystem.

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It's incredibly fitting that my first guest for tooling talks is Olaf. Just
about two year ago I sent an email to Olaf, introduced myself, told him I loved
Metals and that I wanted to help. This ultimately lead to my affinity with
Developer tooling and also my entryway into that world. You may know Olaf from
the impressive amount of tools that's he's either authored or worked on. I'm
sure you probably use some of them. Metals, the Scala Language server, Scalafmt,
the defacto formatter for Scala, Scalafix, mdoc, munit, and Scalameta. Olaf's
fingerprints are all over the standard Scala toolchain. Apart the incredible
amount of work in open source he's done over the years at the Scala Center,
Twitter, and now Sourcegraph, he's also a kind and helpful individual that's
full of insight. It's an absolute pleasure for me to have him as my first guest.

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I'm incredibly excited to be starting this journey with you on Tooling Talks. Every month I'll be having a conversation with someone working in Tooling. We'll dive into tools, talking about the future of tooling, and hopefully provide some insight into how to get started in tooling if you new. Thanks for joining along.

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