What we do describes the goals of the group. This page describes how our processes work.

Community

The ScalaBridge slack is where we hang out online. You’ll find us in the #london channel. (If the signup link has expired please email scalabridgelondon@gmail.com and we’ll create a new one.) We also use meetup to announce events and to market the group.

The main two roles in our community are:

  1. Students, who typically have limited or no programming experience; and
  2. Mentors, who are typically experienced developers working in industry.

Mentors teach small groups but can also help students in other ways: advising on career decisions, making introductions, reviewing job applications, and so on.

Meetings

We run two types of meetings:

  1. In-person meetings. Usually hosted by a company in central London that uses Scala (and therefore is a potential employer).
  2. Online meetings. Accessible to all, so long as you can make the time.

We meet every two weeks, alternating between in-person and online events. Some of you are looking to change careers, and are no doubt in a hurry. On the other hand, we need to set a schedule that is sustainable. This is our compromise. You can go faster on your own, if you want. There will always be people to answer questions in Slack.

Our yearly schedule follows the school timetable. We have three semesters of approximately 12 weeks, with approximately 2 weeks between each semester, and a 6 week break over summer.

We work in small groups, which are typically 2 or 3 students and 1 mentor. We try to keep groups together. It’s nice to have people to share the journey with. Inevitably some people will drop out and some will move at different speeds. This is fine. Just make sure you communicate so we can shuffle groups and mentors as needed.

Students can start wherever in the curriculum they want. We expect those with little or no programming experience will start at the beginning, but more experienced developers might start halfway through or speedrun the first few parts.

Attending

Students will need a laptop with Scala and a development environment installed. We can help install software. Mentors will need the same, but you probably already have that. See the preparation page for details. Other than that, just show up.

In-person meetings will usually be in central London and have food. Online meetings will probably involve some experimentation to find a platform that works well for us. In the past we’ve had the most success with Discord. This is something we’ll talk about.

Curriculum

The curriculum has its own page.