After graduating from Texas A&M University with a degree in Aerospace Engineering, Alvin Alexander became a practicing engineer and was put in charge of maintaining his group’s FORTRAN software applications. He quickly came to enjoy this work, and wanting to learn more about programming, he taught himself the C programming language. That was followed by Unix and network administration, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby, and more recently Scala and Kotlin. During this process he started a software consulting firm, grew it to fifteen people, sold it, and moved to Alaska. After returning to the “Lower 48” he self-published two books, How I Sold My Business: A Personal Diary, and A Survival Guide for New Consultants. Since then he has written three more books: Scala Cookbook; Functional Programming, Simplified; and Hello, Scala. He also created alvinalexander.com, which receives millions of page views every year, and started a new consulting firm just outside of Boulder, Colorado, named Valley Programming.
