Many Scala developers say SBT is “too complex”, but it’s actually a broader problem: users of Maven, Gradle, Bazel, and other build tools all have the same complaint! This talk will explore why build tooling is fundamentally such a difficult domain to work in, and how common concepts from functional and object-oriented programming have the potential to simplify the build tool experience. We will demonstrate how the Mill build tool makes use of these ideas, proving out the idea that build tooling - inside and outside the Scala community - has the potential to be much faster, safer, and easier than it is today.

Li Haoyi graduated from MIT, has built infrastructure for high-growth companies like Dropbox and Databricks, and has been a major contributor to the open source community with over 10,000 stars on Github. Haoyi has deep experience in the JVM and has used it professionally to build cloud infrastructure, distributed backend systems, programming languages, high-performance web applications, and much more.