Opencast devs rise to the Scala challenge

Within Opencast, developers are taken through a four-stage process for training in Scala as the company builds its capacity overall to respond to client needs. Today the company is one of the biggest providers of Scala developers in the North East region.

UK government departments including HMRC and also the Home Office want Scala developers, and Opencast has included them in teams working on their projects.

Tam Mageean, a senior OC scrum master with years of experience working on government digital projects, explains the Scala attraction. “From an operational perspective, the big appeal for standardisation of Scala/functional programming for government departments is that it allows them to operate on a mostly micro service architecture approach to building their services. 

“This makes the services more maintainable, supportable and reusable overall, due to them all being built of mostly the same things and in similar ways. This also allows people to move from team to team more fluidly and even allow services to move from centre to centre with relatively less onboarding needed.”

Opencast’s developers are helping to deliver great work for several UK government partners. They may use technologies like Scala, but because we support our people in their learning and development, not having Scala in their skillset at the outset has not proved an insurmountable hurdle to us helping to deliver great results.

If developers arrive at Opencast with valuable experience and knowledge of agile and XP practices, with the right level of training alongside on-the-job experience, there is almost always capacity for them to grow.

Opencast is deploying up to 30 people into new Scala roles in 2022. For more information, check out our careers page.