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February 5th, 2026, ISSUE 609

READING

Practical observability: distributed tracing with otel4s

In this series, we explore how to bring observability into a Scala application using OpenTelemetry - the open standard for telemetry data - and otel4s, a purely functional OpenTelemetry library for the Typelevel (Cats Effect) ecosystem.
Maksym Ochenashko (@lazy_io)
k6.io Performance Testing

Pros and cons of writing perf tests in Scala.js.
Michał Wiącek
Forms4s: Rapid (Internal) UI Development

Scala.js doesn’t need to compete with TypeScript and React for customer-facing products. There is a much better and more realistic opportunity: internal tools.
Voytek Pituła (@Krever01)
Postmortem of scala/scala3#24994

Nature of the incident: The Scala 3.8.0 artifacts contain invalid references to private fields.
Scala Core Team
The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

We’re truly excited to share that Scala has received an investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund to strengthen Scala’s long-term security, maintenance, and developer experience. The Sovereign Tech Fund is a program of the Sovereign Tech Agency that globally invests in open software components that build our core digital infrastructure.
Darja Jovanovic (@darjutak)
Two Months of Vibe-Coding: Scala, Constraints, Trust and Shipping

I’ve been programming for almost 15 years now, last 5 on mission-critical software in the finance domain. I know the stakes, tradeoffs and implications — most of my daily job is about those. Yet for the last two months I went full-throttle on AI-assisted coding across personal projects, OSS work, and professional tasks.
Voytek Pituła (@Krever01)

RELEASES

Scala 3.8 released!

JDK 17 is now required, Standard Library changes, REPL becomes a separate artifact, stabilised language features, and new preview/experimental features!
Scala contributors
Apache Pekko HTTP 2.0.0-M1

This is milestone release and is aimed at testing this new major version by early adopters. This is experimental. This release should not be used in production.
Pekko contributors
Cyfra

GPU compute pipelines in pure Scala 3.
Cyfra contributors
sttp-ai Agent Loop

sttp-ai uses sttp client to describe requests and responses used in OpenAI, Claude (Anthropic), and OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Agent Loop is a framework for building autonomous AI agents that iteratively solve tasks using tool calling. Provides unified interface for OpenAI, Claude, and custom backends.
softwaremill (@softwaremill)
Metals v1.6.5 - Osmium

We're happy to announce the release of Metals v1.6.5, which brings several exciting new features including completions for implicit classes, auto imports for Java, Type Hierarchy support, and an updated MCP server implementation.
Metals contributors

EVENTS

Scalar Agenda is now online! Mar 26th - 27th, Warsaw, Poland

We've finally announced the full agenda and it's now available on our website.
SoftwareMill (@softwaremill)
J On the Beach, Oct 29th - 30th, Malaga, Spain

A Pure Tech and Fun Conference for All Things Data. Join the CFP, open until March 31st.
J On The Beach (@JOTBConf)
Lambda World, Oct 29th. - 30th, Malaga, Spain

Experience the sunshine, the code, and the unforgettable vibe that made Lambda World 2025 shine in Málaga. CFP open until March 31st.
Lambda World (@lambda_world)

VARIA

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  1. Scala Times Issue #609

    Practical observability: distributed tracing with otel4s. Forms4s: Rapid (Internal) UI Development. Postmortem of scala/scala3#24994. The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala. Two Months of Vibe-Coding: Scala, Constraints, Trust and Shipping.

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