Ken Scambler
Architect MYOB
Ken likes people and computers and likes it better when they can all get along. At MYOB, he is an architect focused on making tech work for people and uncovering hidden simplicity.
Ken is also a long-time fan of functional programming, and is a contributor to the Compose :: Melbourne FP conference, the Melbourne Scala Users Group, and the Monocle optics library in Scala. He has presented a number of popular conference talks on programming topics.
Talks I've Given
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Replatform In A Year or Die; The Tale Of A Turnaround
Featuring Ken Scambler
In 2020, MYOB’s web users saw a major upgrade and a notable increase in stability and rate of feature delivery. What they didn’t see was a behind-the-scenes existential crisis of accumulated tech debt that led to a vast replatform with a hard deadline, racing against the clock to get the company...
leadership replatform technical-debt -
Grow your own tech leads
Featuring Ken Scambler
people-&-processGreat technical leaders don't grow on trees - but they can be grown in-house all the same. This can be an important source of opportunity, learning and satisfaction for team members, and dramatically improve retention. However, there are specific things that can be done to make this process...
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Grow your own tech leads
Featuring Ken Scambler
people-&-processGreat technical leaders don't grow on trees - but they can be grown in-house all the same. This can be an important source of opportunity, learning and satisfaction for team members, and dramatically improve retention. However, there are specific things that can be done to make this process...
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Grow your own tech leads
Featuring Ken Scambler
Great technical leaders don't grow on trees - but they can be grown in-house all the same. This can be an important source of opportunity, learning and satisfaction for team members, and dramatically improve retention. However, there are specific things that can be done to make this process...
people-&-process -
Applied Category Theory - The Emerging Science of Compositionality
Featuring Ken Scambler
What do programming, quantum physics, chemistry, neuroscience, systems biology, natural language parsing, causality, network theory, game theory, dynamical systems and database theory have in common?
As functional programmers, we know how useful category theory can be for our work - or perhaps...
concept -
Adopting FP: A Human-First Approach
Featuring Ken Scambler
Functional programming has made great strides in the popular imagination, yet adoption of FP languages has often been challenging for companies, sputtering in fits and starts. Ken has been at the forefront of REA's successful adoption of FP over four years, and will share lessons learnt and traps...
languages -
Adopting FP: A Human-First Approach
Featuring Ken Scambler
Functional programming has made great strides in the popular imagination, yet adoption of FP languages has often been challenging for companies, sputtering in fits and starts. Ken has been at the forefront of REA's successful adoption of FP over four years, and will share lessons learnt and traps...
languages -
Adopting FP: A Human-First Approach
Featuring Ken Scambler
Functional programming has made great strides in the popular imagination, yet adoption of FP languages has often been challenging for companies, sputtering in fits and starts. Ken has been at the forefront of REA's successful adoption of FP over four years, and will share lessons learnt and traps...
languages -
Lenses for the Masses – Introducing Goggles
Featuring Ken Scambler
Lenses, or more generally “optics”, are a technique that is indispensable to modern functional programming. However, implementations have veered between two extremes: incredible abstractive power with a steep learning curve; and limited domain-specific uses that can be picked up in...
language -
Data Made out of Functions, for Faster Monads
Featuring Ken Scambler
We’ll look at the remarkable technique of Church encoding, whereby any data structure or programming concept can be represented using nothing but the magic sauce of lambda functions! After the talk, you’ll know how to Church encode arbitrary structures yourself, and how it can...
practice -
Introduction to Category Theory
Featuring Ken Scambler
Category Theory is known as one of the most terrifyingly abstract branches of maths, yet functional programmers swear by its effectiveness applied to code. How can this be? What makes it so useful for real-world software development?
Ken will answer these questions and more, explaining the basic...
practice -
Run free with the monads: Free Monads for fun and profit
Featuring Ken Scambler
Free monads are a powerful technique that among other things, can separate the pure representation of code from its interpretation. The representation can be as sophisticated as any imperative program, but totally pure and typesafe! Not only this; once the concepts are understood, applying them...
technique