Michael Pilquist has been using Scala since 2009, when he was convinced to give it a try by listening to Dick Wall and the Java Posse. He introduced Scala at Comcast and has written a number of open source functional programming libraries, including scodec, simulacrum, and ip4s. He is also the lead maintainer of FS2, a functional streaming library, and contributes heavily to the Typelevel ecosystem.
Paul Chiusano has been writing and shipping functional code in Scala since 2008 and is responsible for the introduction and growth of Scala usage at his company, Capital IQ. As part of this effort he co-designed a functional programming curriculum and taught an internal course for coworkers interested in learning FP. Paul is also a regular blogger and speaker on functional programming and Scala.
Rúnar Bjarnason and Paul Chiusano are recognized experts in functional programming and authors of the first edition of Functional Programming with Scala.