One of the co-founders of SoftwareMill, Adam Warski codes mainly using Scala. He is involved in open-source projects, such as sttp, MacWire, Quicklens and others and often shares insights and ideas on SoftwareMill blog.

At Scala Days, Adam is doing a live-coding talk “Concurrent programming in 2019: Akka, Monix or ZIO?” demonstrating how Typed Akka Actors, Monix and ZIO compare in terms of type safety, composability, communication and side-effect management,

In advance of the talk, we caught up with Adam on his Scala Days memories, building SoftwareMill as a transparent, remote-first organisation and his upcoming talk at Scala Days Lausanne.

A maintainer of the Spire library and a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter Institute working on probabilistic models, Denis Rosset uses Scala extensively in his research work and wrote Spire-based libraries to handle linear algebra, permutations or array-backed data structures. When not using Scala, he writes code in MATLAB and curiously enjoys it.

In advance of his Scala Days talk “Pick your number type with Spire”, we spoke to Denis about his research work and how he uses Scala in quantum mechanics, the biggest challenge Scala developers are facing at the moment and his upcoming debut at Scala Days.  

CTO of Besedo, a company that offers content moderation tools and services through AI, automated filters and manual moderation, Nicolas Rinaudo is slowly transitioning the company’s mostly Javascript and Java stack to Scala. This process helped him discover what trips up otherwise talented developers when learning Scala, and to compile a growing list of unexpected corner cases in the language.

In his talk “Scala best practices I wish someone’d told me about” he is putting “the worst offenders” in the spotlight in order to help Scala developers save time and pain. In advance of the talk, we spoke to Nicolas about his 20-year developer career, what frustrated him most in his work and how he started working in Scala on a dare.  

A data engineer based in Chicago, Richard Whaling is currently working on a book about Scala Native (to be released soon, stay tuned!) and has contributed to the 0.2 and 0.3 releases of Scala Native. He is passionate about communicating deep technical concepts in an engaging and passionate way.

In advance of his talk “Fast, Simple Concurrency with Scala Native” at Scala Days Lausanne 2019, we spoke to Richard about his journey from linguistics to Scala, the biggest challenge Scala developers are facing today and that one talk by a fellow Scala speaker that expanded his notion of what is possible in Scala.

A Software Engineer and Trainer with a passion for building systems and products that help others in meaningful ways, Alejandro Lujan is having fun with Big Data at Shopify and leads ScalaQuest, the game to learn Scala. He also organizes Scala Up North, the first and only Scala conference in Canada. He loves teaching and spent a few years working with Lightbend on training others on how to use Scala, Akka and Play to write elegant, solid and maintainable code.

In advance of his talk “ScalaQuest: The Scala Adventure” at Scala Days in New York on June 21st, we spoke to Alejandro about his background and role at Shopify, the challenges of teaching and learning Scala and how ScalaQuest these issues.