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.

A Senior Developer Advocate for Microsoft, Brian Benz wants to win the hearts and minds of Scala developers by showing them first class cloud features. He’s focused on showing  how Microsoft Azure is delivering first class IoT features for distributed systems.

In advance of the workshop, “Understanding Akka Cluster Through Raspberry-Pi Cluster Visualization”, we spoke to Brian about his developer journey and asked some questions about his workshop at Scala Days New York.

An active member of the Scala community since 2008, you could have met Seth Tisue at the Scalawags podcast, the Northeast Scala Symposium, and pretty much any online community around Scala. Having joined the Scala team at Lightbend in 2015, Seth previously used Scala to build the compiler and other tools for NetLogo, an open-source programming language for kids, teachers, and scientists.

In advance of his talk You Are A Scala Contributor at Scala Days in New York on June 20th, we spoke to Seth about his commitment to the open source community, the Scala ecosystem and the future of Scala.  

One of the co-founders of SoftwareMill, where he codes using Scala and other technologies, Adam is involved in open-source projects, such as sttp, MacWire, and Quicklens. In advance of his talk, “sttp: the Scala HTTP client that you always wanted!” , we spoke to Adam about his Scala journey, about the challenge of the “developer experience” and why everyone is a CTO at SoftwareMill.