Jon Pretty
It has been almost half a year since we kicked off our first Scala Center Advisory Board meeting in New York. With a board primarily made up of commercial sponsors, we decided then to offer Bill Venners the role of community representative, and Bill has ably filled this role in the two meetings so far.
But since then, the sponsors have grown to nine, and to maintain a proportionate representation for the community on the board, we decided — with the sponsors’ unanimous agreement — to invite a second community representative to attend and vote in meetings.
We decided to offer the choice of candidate to Typelevel. This was a reflection of the incredible work Typelevel have done to nurture a friendly and open community of functionally-minded Scala users around a number of open-source projects. Their work is focussed around the Cats, Shapeless and Spire libraries, but has grown to include over a dozen other libraries, tools and compiler plugins, all with a shared philosophy.
Typelevel have been instrumental in helping to grow the Scala community, and the functional elements within it, through regular hacking sessions, and with a number of workshops and unconferences colocated with larger Scala events.
So we felt it was only appropriate — given Typelevel’s influence, its track record, and the philosophy of welcomeness it shares with the Scala Center — that they should choose the second community representative to the Advisory Board.
When we spoke to Typelevel, in typical style, they opened a GitHub issue to discuss the invitation, to decide whether to accept it, and to choose a representative. We’re very glad that they accepted, and selected Lars Hupel to sit on the Scala Center Advisory Board alongside Bill.
Lars has made a number of significant contributions to the Scala community in the last few years. His open-source contributions started with work as a maintainer of Scalaz, but he has since worked on the code verification tool, Leon, and libisabelle, which facilitates interacting with the proof assistant, Isabelle, from Scala. All this experience gives Lars a deep understanding of Scala, both as a language and through some of its the most advanced applications.
The Scala Center shall be very happy to welcome Lars, as one of the founders of Typelevel, to the Advisory Board, and at the next meeting (currently scheduled for late November) we shall put his appointment to the existing membership for approval. We have every expectation he will be a valuable asset to the board!