We are Upsolver Engineering #

A short introduction to Functor and Monad for software engineers who already know Scala. It turns out they are both less mysterious and more useful then developers tend to think.

As a company working on large distributed systems, we take logging seriously. Thousands of servers send tens of thousands of messages each second, and the amount keeps growing. While reading line by line at this speed is not humanly possible, our customer operations team constantly reviews the logs, correlating across clusters and accounts to uncover issues.

At Upsolver, our main programming language is Scala. One of Scala’s advantages is that it lets you combine object-oriented programming (OOP) with functional programming (FP) and get the best from both worlds. However, most of our developers who start working in Scala come from the OOP world. If you’ve had very little exposure to FP, how would you know what those “best” things are?