Joshua F. Backfield has been a Senior Software Development Engineer at both Dell SecureWorks, Inc., an industry-leading MSSP and SPARC a Government VA Contractor. He has been responsible for creating and maintaining applications in a variety of languages. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Systems Technologies from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a Masters of Science in Computer Science from DePaul University. He has worked in a variety of languages such as C, C++, Perl, Java, Javascript, and Scala, and constantly continues to learn and grow with more languages.
Maybe you have heard the name “functional programming” and you’re interested to learn what it is. Well there is no better way to learn a new paradigm than by actually seeing it implemented. In this workshop we’ll take a working code example and transform it into the functional paradigm all in Java 7. We’ll step through everything from higher-order functions, function purity and even to some levels of immutability. At the end, we’ll show how we can make use of Java 8’s lambdas by very simple changes to the code that we’ve already refactored.
At the end, you should be able to take the concepts that you learn from this workshop and start using them the next day at work!
Are you interested in learning how to take some existing code and apply the functional paradigm to it? Do you want to better understand how to recognize patterns of reuse and where Functional Programming can be implemented? We’re going to take a small code block and refactor it into a Functional Paradigm. By the end of this, you should have a better understanding of what Functional Programming is and how it can benefit you and your teams as well as being able to recognize patterns of Functional Programming so that you can go and implement these concepts in your own code bases.
