Gilt Groupe Portland

Principles and Advantages of Functional Programming

With multicore processors in cell phones and changes in scale in Enterprise computing, functional programming has risen from the grave to shuffle and moan in even the hallowed halls of Java.

Should we stockpile food and bullets and barracade ourselves in a mall, or should we let this zombie from academia munch our brains? (alt. title - ed.)

This evening we'll discuss some principles and advantages of functional programming, and how the Java programmer can take advantage of FP techniques... even in a largely imperative code base. We'll end the discussion briefly talking about functional programming extensions to Java and JVM-based functional languages, e.g. Clojure.

Speaker: Howard Abrams While once infected by functional programming, has been programming Java web systems for Portland startups for the last fifteen years. Currently working at the Gilt Groupe in their PDX office. Lately he has been rediscovering his FP roots, and thought he'd share his experiences with the PJUG community.

If he does his job right, and the discussion gets riotous, we'll retire to SomeDay Lounge for more conversation and even more beer.

This month's Portland Java User Group topic is 'Forge Ahead to Productivity with JBoss, Red Hat and OpenShift'

About the speaker:

James Perkins is a software engineer at Red Hat and a core engineer for the JBoss Application Server and JBoss Logging projects.

Doors open at 6 PM. The meeting will start at 6:30 PM.

Pizza provided by Tek Systems.

This month's topic: Production-Ready Web Services with Dropwizard

Dropwizard is a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services. The library was developed at Yammer and has been adopted by Simple (formerly BankSimple) and the Gilt Groupe. We will discuss how Gilt is using Dropwizard and why we adopted the library.

Speaker: Sean Sullivan

Sean is a software engineer specializing in e-commerce systems, web services development, and mobile applications. Sean works on back-office applications at the Gilt Groupe and has contributed to various open source projects, including the OAuth Java library and OpenID4Java.

PJUG meetings start with some time to eat and socialize (pizza and beverages are provided), followed by the featured speaker, then Q&A, discussion, sometimes a drawing to give away swag. :)

Though we like knowing how many people to expect, you don't have to RSVP, on Upcoming or otherwise. Go ahead and just show up!

Many people also go for a drink and further discussion following the meeting, typically at a nearby location determined ad hoc.

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