Formerly a trading systems developer in the City of London and a Scala consultant, Zahari Dichev works at Bullet.io, helping companies abandon paper and digitize their business processes with Scala. A passionate advocate of mechanical sympathy and contributor to the Akka Affinity dispatcher, he is interested in sharing his knowledge and views on Scala, Akka, performance and the JVM.

In advance of his talk Creating Native iOS and Android Apps in Scala without tears at Scala Days Lausanne, we spoke to Zahari about his first speaking experience at Scala Days, the problems Scala solves for him and why choosing the right approach is the biggest challenge developers face.  

Another active contributor to the Scala Community, Daniela Sfregola is the maintainer of a few open source projects and organizer of the London Scala User Group meetup. She is also writing a book with Manning Publications, titled “Get Programming with Scala”.

In her talk Refactor all the things! at Scala Days Lausanne, Daniela will analyze snippets of code and highlight common Scala anti-patterns that make them difficult to understand. In advance of the talk, we asked Daniela about her transition from studying ancient Latin and Greek to Scala, the challenges of learning Scala as a newcomer and the details of her upcoming talk.

A software engineer at USU Software AG, Sören works on the Katana platform, helping companies to understand their industrial big data. He’s a contributor to Almond and maintains the almond examples, a growing collection of Scala-based Jupyter notebooks you can try in your browser. He also writes about machine Learning with Scala in Journals and on his blog.

In advance of his talk Interactive Computing with Jupyter and Almond at Scala Days Lausanne, we spoke to Sören about the Twitter challenge that granted him a “golden ticket” to Scala Days, his transition from academia to working on Katana platform and why he encourages using simple, working solutions in Scala.