Underscore was created in 2012, uniting independent Scala consultancies sharing a common set of values and experiences:
When you contact us to discuss an engagement, you’ll have the chance to talk to some of the best in the industry. Based on that conversation, we’ll allocate a lead partner to develop a proposal, and ultimately deliver the work.
The contractual engagement will be with that partner, using our common master service agreement and schedule of work.
The partners have worked together for the best part of a decade. We also tap into our tried-and-tested network of like-minded independent contractors when extra hands are needed.
Click a button below to download an Underscore logo pack. Each file contains a variety of logos in the following formats: Adobe Illustrator (.ai), Portable Document Format (.pdf), High-resolution PNG (transparent), and High-resolution JPG (opaque):
Channing has two decades of software architecture, design and development experience in financial markets, investment banking, internet technologies and academic research. He specialises in agile methods, object oriented programming, and functional programming techniques. Channing has worked with Java since 1995, Scala and LiftWeb since 2008, and also on a number of open source projects. He has also given talks at Skills Matter, ScalaDays 2010, Brunel University and a number of banks on Scala and the Fly Object Space.
Prior to working in software, Channing obtained a PhD in electronics, and worked at UCL in atmospheric physics and high-speed opto-electronics.
Lance Walton has two decades of software architecture, design and development experience in financial markets, investment banking, health provision, internet technologies and academic research. He is a Scrum Master and XP coach, mentor and advisor in Agile Methods of software development and is active in a number of open source projects. Lance has worked with Java since its first release in 1995 and Scala since 2009 and has a particular interest in Object Oriented Analysis and Design, and functional languages. Lance has helped many teams to improve their software development process with the introduction of Agile Methods. He has also successfully combined Agile Methods with 'heavier' process frameworks, such as CMM-I. Lance has a PhD in Neural Networks from the University of Kent and Canterbury.
Miles has run Scala consultancy Chuusai since 2008 and has worked with Scala since it first became publicly available in 2004. He was responsible for the creation of the open source Scala IDE for Eclipse project and his recent activities include shapeless, which aims to explore the boundaries of what's possible within Scala's type system. He is a regular speaker at Scala, functional programming and JVM related conferences and events.
Previously Miles was cofounder and CTO of Codefarm Software Ltd. which applied massively parallel stochastic search and constraint satisfaction technology to the optimization of credit derivative portfolios, winning business from Royal Bank of Canada, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Merrill Lynch.
Prior to that Miles was a senior software architect leading R&D projects at InterX PLC. As a Java Community Process participant he was a member of the Java NIO and XML API expert groups and contributed the reference implementation of the Java Isolation API. He was a participant in the W3C Document Object Model activity and contributed to the IETF’s Guidelines for The Use of XML within IETF Protocols (BCP 70) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (RFC 3986).
He holds a BA in Philosophy from University College London and an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
Kingsley has worked as a consultant in a variety of roles and organisations since 1999. Initially working as a software engineer for a number of financial institutions and startups, he moved into the gaming sector in early 2006 as a research and development engineer at Betfair. In 2009 he moved into the core architecture team at Betfair working on API design, implementation and delivery and advocacy of DevOps mindset and functional programming.
In 2013, Kingsley moved into consulting, initially as Group Technology Director for AKQA where he delivered technology strategy to a range of clients and introduced agile practices in a distributed team environment. In recent years, Kingsley has continued to speak and consult on agile practices, functional programming and microservice delivery to several clients across multiple business domains. His current interests are around event based and distributed organisations and systems.
Richard has worked as a software engineer and consultant since 1993. He has delivered web, data mining and visualisation projects across the publishing, financial, and manufacturing industries for both corporations and small businesses. He adopted Scala and Lift for the productivity gains the technologies bring, a committer on the Lift project, and author of the Lift Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2013). He has a BA in Cognitive & Computing Science and a DPhil in machine learning from the University of Sussex.
Jonathan has over 11 years industry experience delivering JVM-based software for publishers and the travel industry, including high-performance web services. Along with a focus on Scala and Lift, he is an expert in cloud-based delivery and lean development. He has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Auckland.
Nigel is Chief Architect at the Sporting Index Group of Companies and the Architect and project lead on Fly Object Space. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at Brunel University where his main research interests are long running distributed systems and component lifetimes and inter-dependencies. Previously Nigel was the founder and CTO of IntaMission Ltd. and Chief Architect for Europe at Hitachi Software.
He is the co-author of "Java in Practice" and "JavaSpaces in Practice" in the Addison Wesley Java series and is the lead author of two patents in the field of long running distributed software systems.
Noel has over fifteen years experience in software architecture and development, and over a decade in machine learning and data mining. Examples of the projects he's been involved with include one of the first commercial products to apply machine learning to the Internet (eventually acquired by Omniture), a BAFTA award winning website, and a custom CMS used daily by thousands of students.
Noel is an active writer, presenter, and open source contributor. Noel has a PhD in machine learning from the University of Birmingham.
Dave is a passionate advocate of pragmatic functional programming. He is co-lead of Underscore's training program and has authored and co-authored four books on Scala, including Essential Scala, Scala with Cats, Creative Scala, and The Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless.
Spacecat is an Underscore training partner.
