London Scala User Group

🎉 Come along to the London Scala Talks! 🎉

In this event you'll hear from Avinder Bahra, Kannupriya Kalra and Rory Graves.

Agenda
6:00pm - 🥤 Doors open. Come along and grab a drink!
6:35pm - 🗣️ Introduction
6:40pm - 🗣️ Avinder Bahra: The Road to ZIO DynamoDB 3
7:20pm - 🍕 Intermission: Join us for some free food and drinks! Vegan and vegetarian options are provided. Let us know if you'd like something special - we'd be happy to accommodate.
7:50pm - 🗣️ Kannupriya Kalra & Rory Graves: Your Next AI Agent Should Be Written in Scala: Meet LLM4S 1.0
8:20pm - 🥤 Socialising: Grab a drink and let's discuss the talks.
9:00pm - 🍻 Join us in a pub to discuss the talks!

🌐 This event will not have a live stream
We hope to see you there in person.

🗣️ Avinder Bahra: The Road to ZIO DynamoDB 3
ZIO DynamoDB is a Scala library providing both a low level and a high-level, type-safe API for working with Amazon DynamoDB, aiming to remove much of the boilerplate associated with the underlying AWS SDK. In this talk, I'll walk through the journey of developing ZIO DynamoDB 3.x, starting with the problems encountered in the original implementation and the attempts to address them. Finally, we'll look at the resulting 3.x API and see how these design decisions overcome adoption barriers and translate into a simpler and more predictable developer experience with practical code examples.

⭐ Avinder Bahra (He/Him) ⭐
Avinder Bahra had been using Scala as a backend developer for that last 10 years and is the maintainer of ZIO DynamoDB. Fun fact: The first relational database he used was Ingres, which had to be loaded from an 8-inch floppy disk!

🗣️ Kannupriya Kalra & Rory Graves: Your Next AI Agent Should Be Written in Scala: Meet LLM4S 1.0
18 months after LLM4S kicked off, and one year after Kannupriya Kalra

and Rory Graves demonstrated a usable version at Scala Days Switzerland,
LLM4S has evolved into a production-ready, Scala-native AI framework.

But why should your next AI agent be written in Scala?

In this talk, we'll explore how Scala's type system, functional
programming foundations, and mature JVM ecosystem make it a compelling
choice for building reliable, maintainable, production-grade AI
applications.

We'll introduce LLM4S 1.0, demonstrating how Scala developers can build
intelligent agents using multi-provider LLM integration, tool calling,
MCP, agent orchestration, memory, observability, streaming, and
multimodal capabilities, all without leaving the Scala ecosystem.

Beyond the technology, we'll share the journey from an ambitious
open-source idea to LLM4S 1.0: what worked, what failed, the
architectural decisions that mattered, and the lessons we learned
building in one of the fastest-moving areas of software engineering.

Expect live demos, architecture insights, practical examples, and a look
at how to move from your first LLM interaction to a production-ready AI
agent in Scala.

Whether you're an experienced Scala engineer or just starting to explore
generative AI, you'll leave with a clearer understanding of how to get
started with LLM4S and why Scala deserves a place in your AI engineering
toolkit.

⭐ Kannupriya Kalra (She/Her) ⭐
Kannupriya Kalra is the Co-Founder of the LLM4S Foundation and creator
of LLM4S, a Scala-native AI framework. An engineering leader with
experience building scalable backend systems using functional Scala at
Sky in London, she actively contributes to the global Scala and AI
open-source communities.

She has led Google Summer of Code programmes for the Scala Center in
2024 and 2025 and is collaborating with Manning Publishing to develop
practical AI learning resources for developers.

A global speaker, Kannupriya has presented on AI, Scala, and open source
in more than ten countries. She is passionate about making AI
engineering accessible to Scala developers through open-source
collaboration, mentorship, and hands-on learning.

⭐ Rory Graves (He/Him) ⭐
Rory Graves is a software engineer with over 30 years of experience
spanning embedded systems, distributed applications, and internet-scale
platforms.

A long-time Scala advocate, Rory has contributed to numerous open-source
projects, including performance optimisations in the Scala compiler. He
currently works at the intersection of applied AI and ML research,
software engineering, and developer mentorship.