As Delivery Lead, Brand Solutions at Zalando, Alexander Kops oversees development related to core functions important to Zalando's brand partners - from analytics to user services.
This is his second stint with Zalando: In his previous turn with the company, he completely rewrote its PHP-based system to a modular Java-based architecture.

As a Scala and Play Framework enthusiast, he is driving adoption of these technologies within Zalando. He has experience leading both front- and back-end engineering teams and has also helped lead Zalando’s intensive mentoring initiatives.

LOCATION: Zürich
KEYWORDS: Lessons learned, Technology

SPEAKER: Alexander Kops   COMPANY: Zalando
SLIDES: http://de.slideshare.net/ZalandoTech/zalando-tech-from-java-to-scala-in-less-than-three-months

Many people suggest that Scala is difficult to learn and adopt quickly. Based on our experiences as team leaders, however, a bit of groundwork-laying and communication can make a huge difference in speeding up the onboarding process and achieving success in implementing Scala at large scale.

In this talk, I will describe the Scala implementation process for Zalando’s brand solutions team - highlighting some of the difficulties of learning three things (functional programming, a new language and a new tooling system) simultaneously, and ways to overcome them.
I'll wrap up by providing tips on how to ease Scala onboarding within your organization, so you can achieve the same fast results.

LANGUAGE: Talk: en / Slides: en

As Delivery Lead, Brand Solutions at Zalando, Alexander Kops oversees development related to core functions important to Zalando's brand partners - from analytics to user services.
This is his second stint with Zalando: In his previous turn with the company, he completely rewrote its PHP-based system to a modular Java-based architecture.

As a Scala and Play Framework enthusiast, he is driving adoption of these technologies within Zalando. He has experience leading both front- and back-end engineering teams and has also helped lead Zalando’s intensive mentoring initiatives.

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