Sponsors are a huge part of Hackagong. Without the generous contributions from our sponsors, we wouldn’t be running this awesome Hackathon! This is Sponsor Watch, where we take a quick look at one of our sponsors.

Company: Typesafe
Company Website: http://typesafe.com
Location: Our main office is in San Francisco. We also have offices in Uppsala, Sweden and Lausanne, Switzerland. Many of our engineering staff work from home and we are distributed across 14 countries around the world.
Number of Employees: 60

What does your company do?

We are an open source software company and the caretakers of the Scala programming language, Akka concurrency/distributed toolkit and Play web development framework.

We have also defined the Reactive programming movement which best describes our DNA: http://reactivemanifesto.org

How did your company first get started? What’s the origin story?

Typesafe was formed by Martin Odersky and Jonas Boner. Martin is the creator of Scala and Jonas is the creator of Akka. Both Martin and Jonas found that their thoughts resonated at many levels and decided to join forces. The Reactive movement was ultimately formed from this collaboration.

Why did you sponsor Hackagong 2014?

We saw that there was a lot of PHP at last year’s Hackagong, a little .NET, 1 JS and nothing that was JVM based. We wish to promote the idea that JVM development equates to being productive, and the Play web development framework is our vehicle to do so. We can show that using Play instead of PHP will result in less code being needed while also yielding a high degree of quality and with no compromise on productivity.

Our main goal is to raise awareness of reactive architectures, functional programming, Scala, Akka and Play and see that they become a part of Australian university curriculums for Software Engineering and Computer Science.

Has your company ever held internal hackathons?

Yes, our San Francisco office hosts hackathons. We also attend many events globally and participate in and run other hackathons.

What is the most awesome thing or project your company has done?

We play a significant caretaking role in Scala, Akka and Play and nurture their open source communities. My personal view is that these constitute our largest achievement.

Twitter runs on Scala and LinkedIn runs on Play and Scala. These are huge achievements also and show that the reactive approach we push works very well.

For a full list of case studies please visit: http://typesafe.com/company/casestudies

What’s an internal/industry problem your company would like to solve?

We wish to challenge conventional programming ideas toward being message based, elastic, resilient and responsive.

What are you most looking forward to at Hackagong 2014?

If we can get 2-3 teams using Play and Scala then our mission will have been accomplished. We are also offering a $2000 cash prize to the team that writes the best Play and Scala application. Experts will be there to help. It is a no-brainer!

Are you currently hiring and if so, what type of person are you looking for?

We are always on the look out of talented individuals. From an engineering perspective, having an open-source profile i.e. helping out with open-source projects is held in very high regard.

What trending technology are you most excited for over the next 5 years?

Ours!

Hackagong thanks Typesafe and our other sponsors for their generous contribution for this years event.