Wednesday 26 November 2025

Darja Jovanovic, Scala Center

This summer, the Scala Center celebrated 15 years of Scala Days, returning this August to its birthplace: Lausanne, Switzerland. The recordings of all the talks are now available on the Scala Days YouTube channel, and with that, here are some closing remarks, and a look ahead to the future.

The theme Functional Programming And The Real World attracted 57 excellent talks, and with 5 workshops, 27 sponsors, around 300 attendees, including several co-located events, the town was buzzing with Scala energy. We heard that in a bar far from the conference center, a local bartender proudly welcomed Scala enthusiasts after spotting the logo on their T-shirts and, to everyone’s delight, replied:

“Of course we know Scala, it was designed here at EPFL!”

Even the journey was part of the fun: thanks to the London Scala User Group, attendees boarded the Scala Jam Train from London through Paris — a rolling meetup that brought the community together before the first talk even began.

This wonderful experience was only possible thanks to the many hands and hearts behind the scenes and on the stage.

• Attendees — for your questions, hallway conversations, and enthusiasm that filled Lausanne with Scala spirit.
• Organizers — for months of planning, coordination, and care that made it all seamless.
• Program Committee — for building such a thoughtful lineup.
• Speakers — for sharing your knowledge, passion, and curiosity.
• Sponsors — for your generous support and commitment to the Scala community, helping make Scala Days possible.
• Volunteers — for your energy, kindness, and problem-solving superpowers.

We thank you all ♥️

All Talks Now on YouTube 🎥

We knew choosing between four parallel tracks would be tough — and that’s exactly the feedback we heard throughout the week! Good news: all talks and keynotes are now available on the Scala Days YouTube channel. Relive the insights, learn something new, or discover what you missed.

🎯 Panorama Track – a grand tour of the Scala ecosystem: language evolution, tooling innovation, and community discussions.

🏢 Industry Track – real-world stories from teams running Scala at scale, exploring lessons learned and business impact.

💡 Developer Experience Track – deep dives into tooling, productivity, and how to get more out of your daily Scala flow.

🎨 Creative & Mix Track – a vibrant mix of technical talks, playful experiments, and unexpected ways Scala shows up in life and work.

Building Trust: Inclusion, Safety, and Community

At the Scala organization, we aim to build trust in Scala as an open source software project by providing regular releases, clear governance and open processes. Beyond the codebase we work to cultivate trust by making Scala Days a welcoming and inclusive space where community members can learn, share, and engage professionally in a safe environment. This year’s conference strengthened this commitment by focusing further on these key areas:

Safe environment An updated Code of Conduct and on-site expert support team were available throughout the event, and many attendees took the opportunity to learn more about these resources. Organizers and volunteers trained in advance, speakers received dedicated briefings, and all attendees were oriented before the conference began — ensuring that everyone, from first-timers to long-time participants, felt encouraged and equipped to contribute to a culture of safety.

Inclusive by design Inclusion by design starts with infrastructure. This year we ensured full accessibility across the conference experience while continuing to invest in thoughtful, community-specific details: a quiet room, a tourist information point, and volunteers ready to assist. We also provided on-site childcare and encouraged participants to bring partners and families, making Scala Days a shared experience.

Community building Our conference-wide icebreaker game, Find Your Twin, gave everyone a simple, playful starting point to meet new people and begin building connections. Colocated social activities and informal gatherings throughout the week further supported this. A highlight for many was the Community Party at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts (MUDAC), where attendees could stroll through exhibitions, spark fun informal conversations — a relaxed setting for getting to know one another and deepening community connections.

Program flow We understood that with so many fantastic talks, it could be tough for our attendees to organise their day around which talks they wanted to see the most. To support this, we organized the agenda into four thematic tracks, giving attendees clearer pathways through the content. And through the speaker buddy program and other coordination efforts, speakers were encouraged to learn about related sessions and, when appropriate, highlight those connections during their talks that helped guide attendees toward topics most relevant to their interests.

We hope that these efforts played a part in the remarkable outcome that nearly 50% of attendees were joining Scala Days for the first time — a promising indicator of renewed trust, openness, and growth.

Looking Ahead

As we wrap up this year’s Scala Days, and thanks to your feedback, we already have many ideas about how to further enhance the conference experience: from business-driven opportunities to deepen industry engagement, to new formats that elevate technical learning, networking, and collaboration.

Please stay tuned for Scala Days 2026 as we have announcements coming soon! Until then, keep learning, keep sharing, and keep Scala vibrant.

Your support keeps Scala Days thriving and the Scala community growing.

VirtusLab – The company behind Scala. VirtusLab showcased its long-standing commitment to the Scala ecosystem — from contributing to the language itself and developing key tools like Scala CLI and Metals, to building popular Scala OSS libraries. Their focus on developer productivity, IDE and Bazel expertise, and LLM-assisted workflows, combined with the efficient delivery of high-quality software solutions for numerous partners, reflects their 15+ years of leadership in Scala innovation.

Signify Technology – Building a diverse future, one placement at a time. As a global Scala recruitment specialist, Signify connects top-tier engineering talent with forward-thinking companies. With offices in LA, Austin, and London, they continue to champion diversity and inclusion in tech hiring worldwide.

Gradle – Accelerate every Scala build. Gradle’s Develocity platform now integrates with sbt to help teams observe, optimize, and speed up their builds — empowering faster feedback cycles and better developer experience.

JetBrains – Easier and smarter software development. JetBrains has supported the Scala community for many years. This time, the IntelliJ Scala Plugin team came to Scala Days to present the AI-powered tooling JetBrains offers for developers, along with both new capabilities and long-standing hidden gems of IntelliJ IDEA and the Scala Plugin. Together, these tools help developers boost their productivity and make everyday Scala development more enjoyable.

Scalac – Your Scala & AI engineering partner. With 11 years of expertise and over 130 delivered projects, Scalac continues to champion open source, community growth, and global partnerships. They invite you to explore the latest trends shaping Scala’s future, check out their State of Scala Report—a comprehensive look at the ecosystem’s direction, challenges, and opportunities ahead.

Writer – Where AI meets business. Writer showcased its agent-builder platform that bridges IT and business teams, offering tools to build, activate, and supervise enterprise AI agents — and invited Scala engineers to join their growing AI research and engineering efforts.

Xebia – Engineering excellence, powered by Scala and AI. Xebia reignited its Scala community presence with demos, workshops, and hands-on sessions on event-sourced domain modeling and domain-driven design in Scala 3.

Kpler – *Scala powering data at scale.*For over a decade, Kpler has been building high-performance applications powered by the Scala ecosystem — leveraging its strong type system, functional programming paradigm, and thriving community. At Scala Days, they shared their journey and commitment to contributing back to the community.

A warm thank-you to our Bronze sponsors for their continued support of Scala Days and the wider community: Scala Teams, Mastercard, MOIA, Les Toises, Rock the JVM, ngrok, YouMoni, DFiant Works, Snowplow Analytics, SoftwareMill, Tiko, Recorded Future, SwissBorg, Deltek, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Artima, NuMind, SiriusXM, and Netflix.

A special thank-you to EPFL, the birthplace of Scala, for hosting Scala Days 2025 and welcoming the community. From the lecture halls where Scala was first conceived to today’s thriving academic and industry ecosystem, EPFL continues to nurture the language’s growth and spirit.