I wanted the Scala training as soon as we could get it.
Reonomy already had engineers using the language, but they did not all start in the same place. A few knew it well. Others had some exposure. Some were strong programmers who had barely used Scala at all. That made normal team learning harder. The same explanation could be obvious to one person and completely new to the person beside them.
I found a company that offered a two-day essentials class and asked about a private session in our New York office. The instructor wanted to understand the group before confirming it. I gave him a plain picture of the range and asked for the earliest useful date.
We went back and forth for a few days. I checked the dates with the team, chose February 8 and 9, and sent the invoice to our payables account. The trainer planned to give the newer Scala developers material to complete first so the in-person time would not disappear into basic syntax.
This was not an attempt to turn everybody into the same engineer. I wanted a shared base. Reonomy had a complicated application history, and newer services were being built beside older parts of the product. People needed enough of the same language and patterns to review one another's work and make changes without adding another strange layer.
I had learned plenty of technology by opening a manual, breaking something, and staying up until it worked. That approach is useful, but it does not automatically give a team the same vocabulary. A focused room with a good instructor could get us there faster.
The class was now booked. The next part belonged to the engineers: do the preparation, ask practical questions, and bring the lessons back to the code we had to operate every day.