Developers who are new to Scala often shy away from coming into contact with implicits, and by extension, understanding typeclasses. In big organizations that have been adopting Scala at scale, you sometimes even come across hard rules that put a ban on the use of implicits because that language feature is considered to be too advanced and not understood by a lot of developers. On the other hand, implicits and typeclasses are used heavily not only by a lot of the most important Scala frameworks and libraries, but also in the standard library. Given the fact that it is so hard to evade them when writing real world Scala code, I would like to encourage developers adopting Scala to overcome their fear of implicits and instead embrace the typeclass pattern.

In this talk, as an intermediate Scala developer, you will learn everything you really need to know about typeclasses: What they are good for and how they compare to what you are familiar with from object-oriented languages, when you should and should not use them, how the pattern can be encoded in Scala and how to write your own typeclasses, how to provide instances of typeclasses for your own or existing types, and how to do all of this with minimal boilerplate. Throughout the talk, you will see numerous examples of typeclasses used in the Scala ecosystem and the standard library, and you’ll see that you don’t need to know anything about category theory to benefit from embracing typeclasses.