Stew O'Connor learned about then quickly became addicted to Scala about 3 years ago, and was drawn right to the pure functional programming endeavors in Scala, he made many contributions to the scalaz library, and now is one of the primary contributors to the Cats library. He works at Verizon as a software architect where they are trying to gradually steer a very large team of scala developers to a more pure and disciplined style of writing scala.