Alex Payne is CTO at Simple Finance, a startup building the future of retail banking. Previously, he was Platform Lead at Twitter, where he worked on the popular social messaging service’s developer platform and backend architecture; he presented on building distributed systems in Scala at Twitter at Philly ETE 2010. Alex is the organizer of the Emerging Languages event, a showcase for new programming languages and implementation approaches. He co-authored O’Reilly’s “Programming Scala” with Dean Wampler in 2009. Alex lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and writes online at http://al3x.net/.