This talk was recorded at Scala Days New York, 2016. Follow along on Twitter @scaladays and on the website for more information http://scaladays.org/. Abstract: Doing I/O in Scala (and Java) involves either invoking some magic "FileUtil" or browsing through StackOverflow. In this talk, we will introduce better-files (https://github.com/pathikrit/better-files) - a thin wrapper around Java NIO to enable simple, safe and sane I/O in Scala. We will also discuss problems with designing an I/O library that would make everyone happy and different schools of thoughts e.g. monadic vs non-blocking vs effect-based APIs