About Escalate Software

Principals Bill Venners and Dick Wall have a deep and extensive knowledge of the Scala language, experience in applying Scala in real world projects, and a strong track record of training and mentoring in Scala and other technologies.

Bill is the creator of ScalaTest, a popular, flexible and complete testing solution for Scala, which includes libraries and domain specific languages for unit and functional testing, specification and behavior driven development. Bill is the co-author of Programming in Scala, the first published book on Scala. The book is co-authored by Lex Spoon and Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala language. Bill is also well known in the Java enterprise space, being the creator of the Artima site, and having run many enterprise training events in the past. Bill has been working in Scala for over four years.

Dick is founder and co-organizer of the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts (BASE)—a monthly developer-centric Scala group in Silicon Valley. He has been working in Scala for over three years. He is a ScalaTest committer and creator of SubCut - a dependency injection solution for Scala. Dick also is a former Google developer advocate where he taught hundreds of developers, both internal and external to Google, topics like Android, Google App Engine, Google Collections Library (now Guava) and GWT. In addition, Dick is the creator and co-host of the Java Posse podcast.