ScalaBridge London is a meetup where instead of talks we do hands on learning. We meet every two weeks, alternating between in-person and online. Our calendar has all the dates of our events.

We have many online attendees who cannot make our in-person events, so we treat the online and in-person events separately. For our in-person events we ask attendees to commit to attending all the events in a term. This is because we need to do a lot of organization for each term, which gets messed up if people come and go. At in-person events we run two tracks:

  1. Foundations, which is aimed at beginner programmers (including those who have never programmed before.) This is taught by experienced teachers and follows our curriculum. It will take several terms to get through this material.

  2. Advanced, which is for everyone else. We pick a topic each term and spend our time going in depth on that topic.

We work in groups of between three to six, and for the Advanced track try to mix people of different experience levels so that the more experienced can help guide the less experienced.

We currently have two online groups: a Foundations groups, and an Advanced group that is working on a web development task. You can join in with either group, or create a new group to address your own interests.

Topics

Our Advanced in-person groups currently focus on a single topic each term. The topic for the summer term of 2024 is Cats Effect. The topic is chosen by voting at the start of the term.

We have chosen to only do a single topic as it makes it easier to prepare material and reorganize groups if needed. However you (yes, you!) can organize a different topic if you want to.

We also do non-programming things from time-to-time, such as interview practice, presentation preparation, and karaoke. If that is something of interest to you, just ask and we’ll see what we can do.

Roles

A few people take on special roles:

  • Teachers help teach the Foundations track. This is closer to a traditional teacher and student relationship than in the Advanced track.
  • Group leads look after an Advanced group, making sure it stays on-track and gets unstuck if it encounters problems.
  • Organizers are the suckers who do the behind-the-scenes organization, preparing material and arranging venues.

Diversity

Increasing diversity is a goal of ScalaBridge London. To that end we especially welcome people we are underrepresented within the programming community. All our events are covered by our code of conduct.

Community-Run

ScalaBridge London is community run, meaning it is run by the people it serves. We have an informal management structure. (We’ll formalize it if the need arises.) Anyone can get involved with decision making if they’re interested, and similarly, anyone can propose an activity.

A Bit of History

We started in 2019 and run until COVID made it impossible to continue, stopping at the end of 2020. Now in 2023 we’re starting up again. This means things are a little bit in flux as we work to organize everything and implement the lessons we learned in our first run.

We intend to run ScalaBridge London as a two-year experiment, to see it’s possible to deliver on our vision in a sustainable way. After two years we’ll make a decision about the long term future.