a regional tech conference that's also global


stricter Scala with -Yno-lub


For a flexible language like Scala, it's useful to think of subset of the programming language, like your own personal Good Parts, and opinionated style guides.


To try -Yno-lub, you can drop in the following sbt plugin to project/ynolub.sbt:

addSbtPlugin("com.eed3si9n" % "sbt-ynolub" % "0.2.0")


When Scala's type inferencer finds type A and type B to unify, it tries to calculate the lub (least upper bounds) of two types with regards to <:<. This process is sometimes called lubbing. Here are some of the examples:

scala> if (true) Some(1) else None
res0: Option[Int] = Some(1)
scala> if (true) List(1) else Nil
res1: List[Int] = List(1)

One idea I've been thinking about for a few years is that lubbing in its current form is not helpful.

herding cats: day 1


Check out my new series herding cats. (I'm writing it using Pamflet from the get go)

This is a log of me going through Cats, a functional programming library for Scala that is currently experimental and under active development.

The road to sbt 1.0 is paved with server



I gave a talk at Scala Days 2015 San Francisco with Josh Suereth (@jsuereth).

switching Java version


I've been switching between Mac and Ubuntu, and between Java 6 and 7 lately.
This is a memo of how to switch Java versions on both Mac and Ubuntu.

Update: Yoshida-san told me about this thing called jEnv, which does all this.


Here's one way of loading different shell files depending on the OS:

## basic
[ -f $HOME/dotfiles/zshrc.basic ] && source $HOME/dotfiles/zshrc.basic

## aliases
[ -f $HOME/dotfiles/zshrc.alias ] && source $HOME/dotfiles/zshrc.alias

case "${OSTYPE}" in
# MacOSX

monads are fractals


On my way back from Uppsala, my mind wandered to a conversation I had with a collegue about the intuition of monads, which I pretty much butchered at the time. As I was mulling this over, it dawned on me.

Sierpinski triangle

monads are fractals

The above is a fractal called Sierpinski triangle, the only fractal I can remember to draw. Fractals are self-similar structure like the above triangle, in which the parts are similar to the whole (in this case exactly half the scale as parent triangle).

towards universal access at a conference


Two days of #ScalaMatsuri ended as a huge success. But for the next year, I'm leaving ourselves a few homeworks to work on. As the title suggests, the next goal that we should aim for is universal access. In Scala language, universal access principle indicates the fact that both methods and fields can be accessed interchangeably from outside.

For a conference, I mean universal access to mean being more inclusive to various groups of people:

  • women/men/straight/LGBT programmers
  • Japanese/English speakers
  • beginners and experts
  • postdocs
  • people from other Asian countries

ScalaMatsuri day1


This year was the second Scala conference in Japan. We've changed the name to ScalaMatsuri, which means Scala festival in Japanese. 300 tickets sold out. With invited guests and free tickets for sponsors, there may have been even more people. The venue was at CyberAgent, which runs blog service and online ad services.

Vim memo

Personally, I don't mind using SublimeText, which is my editor of choice for a while. But I'm also curious about commandline editors since many people taut their ability to code over the network. You could forward X or remote in using some other way and still use Sublime, but let's see how if goes.

I started working on this Vim setup when I got a new MBP recently. Figured, I can try something new. So, this post is more of a personal memo written by a total newbie, which is what blogs are all about. caveat emptor. In general though, the configuration is mostly inspired by yuroyoro-san's blog post from a couple years ago.

various non-vim things


The setup described in this post is checked into eed3si9n/dotfiles. It is encouraged to fork other's dotfiles, but I wanted to understand what settings I'm bringing in, so I wrote mine from scratch.

The general idea of the dotfiles is that it will be checked out to ~/dotfiles/, and contains files like zshrc. These root-level configuration files are then symbolically linked under the home directory as ~/.zshrc.

scripting with Scala


The need for regular expressions is real. Whenver I need to transform a set of text files it usually ends up with fumbling through the documentation of find command, zsh, and StackOverflow Perl questions. I would rather use Scala instead of muddling through Perl. It's really the matter of my familiarity than anything else.

For example, I now have over a hundred reStructuredText files that I want to convert into markdown. I first tried pandoc, and it looked mostly ok. As I was going through the details, however, I noticed that many of the code literals were not converting over as formatted. This is because they were formatted using either single ticks or using Interpreted Text. Preprocessing the text with a series of regex replacements should work.

Syndicate content