Welcoming New Steering Committee Members

Since our last post, the Typelevel Steering Committee has happily welcomed six new members to our group: Zach McCoy, Sam Pillsworth, Jasna Rodulfa-Blemberg, Andrew Valencik, Vasil Vasilev, and Mark Waks (aka Justin du Coeur). In their own words:

Zach McCoy (he/him)

I’ve been programming in Scala professionally for 10 years. I currently work at Jack Henry where I get to work in Scala and deal with observability in systems. I’m based in Iowa where I work remotely. I can usually be found reading or playing Magic: The Gathering.

Sam Pillsworth (she/her)

I’ve been writing code in industry for about 7 years, and the programming before that doesn’t count because it was in Fortran. Currently I’m a senior data developer writing Scala to power search in the Shopify Help Center. I’m based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In my free time I read a lot of books, play with my dog Janeway, and futz with my emacs config.

Jasna Rodulfa-Blemberg (she/they)

I’ve been programming in Scala for the past 5 years, and more broadly in the JVM for most of my 9-year career. I currently work for Etsy, where I help scale and maintain their search platform using Scala. I work remotely from the Washington, DC, USA area with my partner and the wild rabbits in my yard.

I love cooking, gaming, reading, writing, and staying fit. More recently, I’ve begun reviving my Japanese language skills from college.

Andrew Valencik (he/him)

I’ve been writing Scala for 6ish years, on and off. Currently I manage a data science team and a developer team at Shopify working on search systems in the support area. I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

I like cooking when I have all day to do it, being outside, and rotating through hobbies.

Vasil Vasilev (he/him)

I’ve been doing Scala for about 5 years now and for about 3 years in the open-source community. I’m a software developer at JetBrains, working on the Scala Plugin team out of Munich, Germany.

I like to split my free time between cycling, gaming and reading, as well as Scala open-source contributions, especially Cats Effect.

Mark Waks, aka Justin du Coeur (he/him)

I’ve been programming for about 40 years in a wide variety of languages, the past 10 full-time in Scala. My current dayjob is at Troops (now part of Slack/Salesforce), working remotely from Somerville, MA; in my spare time, I run Querki, a sort of wiki/database hybrid written entirely in Scala.

I’m a pretty generalized geek, active in SCA, LARP, SF/F fandom, board games, comics, etc. I’m in charge of the Boston Scala Meetup, and on the board of the NE Scala conference (both currently dormant due to covid).

These new members are excited to continue Typelevel’s efforts to foster an inclusive, welcoming, and safe environment around functional programming in Scala. You can find the members throughout the Typelevel GitHub space and on our Discord server with the @steering role.