Erik is one of the creators of Spire, a Typelevel project designed to support fast, generic, and precise numerical programming in Scala. He is a contributor to the Scala compiler and standard library, and uses Scala to push the limits of JVM performance and expressiveness. Erik works at Meetup, where he collects, processes, and analyzes data to learn how to more effectively create community.

If hearing 'regular expression' makes you think of Perl or that Jamie Zawinsky quote, think again! Kleene algebras are a generalization of regular expressions that can be used to compute transitive closure, shortest path, solve linear equations, and more! This talk will explore Kleene algebras, model them in Spire, and go through several concrete examples, with particular attention to regular expressions and languages. We'll see how algebraic properties plus laziness allow an amazingly expressive and powerful implementation.

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