I'm a software engineer at NASA JPL.

Scala is a gateway drug. I was once a happy, well-adjusted Java programmer, content with a quiet life of boilerplate and NullPointerExceptions. Sure, I'd have some generics now and then at a party, just to be social, but I had it under control. That all changed when I tried Scala... it wasn't long before I was into the hard stuff; Haskell, Category Theory, the Calculus of Constructions. I became listless and bored in my everyday programming life. Obsessed with finding that next abstraction high, I grew a neck beard and blathered about monoids to anyone who would listen. I still haven't hit rock bottom.