Why Scala?

Alex Payne is Chief Product & Technology Officer for BankSimple, a startup working to make personal finance simple, honest, and dependable again. Previously, Alex was one of the first employees at Twitter, the popular social messaging network. There, Alex led development of the Twitter Platform, growing it into one of the most popular software platforms on the Web. Before joining Twitter, he worked for an Information Security contractor in the military and intelligence sector. Alex got his start writing software for political campaigns and non-profits in Washington, DC.

Alex is a frequent speaker on software engineering practices and systems architecture at conferences around the world. He’s the co-author of Programming Scala, and is passionate about the history and evolution of programming languages.

• Web site

Dean Wampler is Principal Consultant at Think Big Analytics, specialists in “Big Data”, Machine Learning, and the Hadoop ecosystem. He speaks frequently at conferences on various topics, such as the effective use of different programming languages and modularity paradigms: functional, object-oriented, and aspect-oriented programming.

Dean is the co-author of Programming Hive (O’Reilly, 2012), the author of Functional Programming for Java Developers (O’Reilly, 2011) and the co-author of Programming Scala (O’Reilly, 2009).

• Web site