Principal Systems Engineer at AT&T Chief Data Office, Ronen Kahana has been practicing software development and enterprise architecture since the late 90’s. He is now designing and implementing ML and AI at scale using Scala, Spark, Hadoop, and Kafka.

At Scala Days New York, Ronen, together with Austin Henslee and Johan Muedsam, is hosting a workshop ‘Building Spark Apps With a Flexible, Proven Project Template”. We spoke to Ronen in advance of the workshop about his professional journey, the problems Spark solves and the upcoming workshop at Scala Days New York.  

A software engineer who graduated from Lomonosov MSU with a degree in Physics, Marina Sigaeva is a fashion, ballet and travel addict who, in her own words, “loves life and Scala”. In advance of her talk “Scala is for everyone” on June 20th at Scala Days in New York, we spoke to Marina about her vision of Scala and why she’s writing a Scala book for kids.

If you teach Scala, chances are you face a number of questions around mentoring engineers that are new to the language. With our all-star panel of  experienced Scala educators and teachers—ranging from academia to industry, in-person education to massive online courses—we’re inviting you to join the discussion Teaching Scala: A Roundtable Discussion on June 20th at Scala Days in New York and get a new perspective on teaching Scala to beginners. Together we’ll discuss past mistakes, lessons learned and how we can most effectively teach Scala.

In advance of the panel discussion, we spoke to the panel participants Ryan Tanner (Twitter), Mark Lewis (Trinity University), Li Neville (Spotify) and Maciej Gorywoda (Wire) about their Scala experience.

One of the first Scala adopters in Poland, Java Champion, member of the core Akka team at Lightbend and the citizen of the world (currently based in Japan), Konrad ‘ktoso’ Malawski is on a mission to make entering the Akka ecosystem and “using the right tool for the right job” simple and understandable, both for veterans and newcomers to Scala and Akka and distributed systems.

In advance of his talk at Scala Days, “Networks and Types — the Future of Akka”, we spoke to Konrad about his Akka journey, the biggest challenges Akka developers face today and whom he’s looking to connect with at Scala Days.