Scala Meetup #8: Tubi’s gRPC Evolution, Functional Programming with Scala, and Scala in Interactive Notebooks

The eighth Scala Meetup, attended by over 2,000 online participants, presented three in‑depth talks. The first speaker, a backend engineer from Tubi, explained the evolution of gRPC at Tubi, its four communication modes, and demonstrated a simple HelloWorld gRPC application, highlighting gRPC’s strong typing, multi‑language support, efficient protobuf serialization, streaming capabilities, Kubernetes integration, and the performance benefits of migrating to Akka‑gRPC.

The second session covered Scala and functional programming. The presenter introduced a AI‑assisted medical diagnosis project built with Scala and TypeScript, then explained core functional programming principles such as managing side effects, pure functions, and the use of monads (including IO monad) to model effectful computations. The talk also showcased the Cats library’s type classes and compared the Flag Boot micro‑service framework with Spring Boot.

The final talk explored the use of Scala in interactive notebooks, demonstrating various Scala libraries and use‑cases that extend beyond traditional server development. Attendees were encouraged to explore the provided slide decks, watch the full video recordings on Bilibili (BV1h14y1M7uD, BV1Ls4y1t7uF, BV1od4y1L7K3), and refer to additional Scala resources and past meetup recaps.