Dean Wampler, Ph.D. is a Consultant for Typesafe, where he specializes in helping clients succeed with Scala and Functional Programming projects. He works with "Big Data" tools like Hadoop, Spark, and Machine Learning libraries, and Reactive tools like Akka and Play. Dean is an O'Reilly author and a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington.
Alex Payne is Platform Lead at Twitter, where he develops services that enable programmers to build atop the popular social messaging service. Alex has previously built web applications for political campaigns, non-profits, and early-stage startups, and supported information security efforts for military and intelligence customers. In his free time, Alex studies, speaks, and writes about the history, present use, and evolution of programming languages, as well as minimalist art and design.