Come join other Scala enthusiasts to talk about all-things Scala related. Whether you're a newcomer or are writing books on the subject, we welcome you. If you're interested in giving a talk or have a talk you'd like someone to give (we'll do our best to find someone qualified), let us know.

This month, we plan to have presentations and discussions around Akka, actors and futures (both Akka's implementation and others). Come join us if you're interested in these topics or others.

Join us for an evening of Tech Talks: PDX Edition at Urban Airship's space in the Pearl. This evening's theme is high-performance network programming.

Scott Andreas will talk about network-level oddities that are important to think about when designing high-performance network applications. Lower-level TCP behaviors such as incast, Nagle's algorithm, and tcp_retries2 are a few examples of what we'll learn about – and how to avoid getting hit by them when you don't expect it!

Erik Onnen will speak on designing and implementing network-intensive applications on the JVM, with a focus on high-throughput and low-latency IO. He'll dig into different frameworks for languages like Java (Netty), Scala (Akka), and Clojure (Aleph), synchronous vs. async IO – and how to decide which to go with. Specific topics will be drawn from practical application building large scale, high throughput messaging systems dealing with millions of mobile devices.

Testing REST: Functional Correctness At Scale Using AKKA and REST Assured

This month's speaker is Steve Hall who has 20 years of experience designing and delivering unique solutions to business problems. Steve is a Lead Software Engineer working with REST, big data and social solutions at Nike in Beaverton, OR.

His current project enables millions of users on mobile devices to follow and just as easily stop following any digital content that may be of interest to them. The team has found that building these systems using REST and NOSQL can scale massively. However, achieving that scale requires some unique approaches for handling the volumes of data that needs to be stored. Tonight he will present an overview of what the team has learned about data modeling in a typical NOSQL datastore such as Cassandra or Dynamo. Following that he will discuss why traditional unit, integration, and performance testing approaches proved to be inadequate, and why the team went looking for a better solution.

Having presented the problem, he will then present how the team has applied AKKA and Rest Assured to create a testing framework that proves the system is functionally correct at scale, and why it matters.

Finally, he will close with a few insights for other ways that AKKA could be useful when working at large scale.