About the Author

Christian Baxter, from an early age, has always had an interest in understanding how things worked.  Growing up, he loved challenges and liked to tinker with and fix things. This inquisitive nature was the driving force that eventually led him into computer programming. While his primary focus in college was life sciences, he always set aside time to study computers and to explore all aspects of computer programming. When he graduated from college during the height of the Internet boom, he taught himself the necessary skills to get a job as a programmer. He’s been happily programming ever since, working across diverse industries such as insurance, travel, recruiting, and advertising. He loves building out high-performance distributed systems using Scala on the Akka platform.

Christian was a long time Java programmer before making the switch over to Scala in 2010. He was looking for new technologies to build out high throughput and asynchronous systems and loved what he saw from Scala and Akka. Since then, he's been a major advocate for Akka, getting multiple ad tech companies he’s worked for to adopt it as a means of building out reactive applications. He's also been an occasional contributor to the Akka codebase, identifying and helping to fix issues. When he’s not hacking away on Scala and Akka, you can usually find him answering questions on Stackoverflow as cmbaxter.