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.

A Scala & Akka champion and a global course instructor for Lightbend, Eric began programming in various machine languages over 35 years ago, passing via C and Java to Scala and Akka.

At Scala Days, together with Kiki Carter, Principal Enterprise Architect at Lightbend, Inc., and Brian Benz, Sr. Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, he will be hosting a workshop “Understanding Akka Cluster Through Raspberry-Pi Cluster Visualization”. In this interview, Eric speaks about his career, the biggest challenges Scala and Akka developers are facing right now and the workshop he’s hosting at Scala Days New York in June.