Gordon Cooke
Gordon Cooke is the founder of Scala Teams and founder/CTO of UpStart Commerce. He brings decades of experience leading engineering teams and architecting e-commerce and distributed systems. His career spans hands-on architecture, technology leadership, and building companies, including co-founding Spark::red. At Scala Teams, he focuses on helping organizations build scalable, maintainable software through specialist Scala and functional programming expertise. He founded the company in response to challenges he experienced firsthand: finding senior Scala talent and building reliable distributed engineering teams.
Sessions
Hard to Hire, Hard to Learn, Hard to Break: A CTO’s Scala Case
Talk
12. October 2026, 15:00 - 15:30
Maschinenhaus
To business leadership, Scala looks like a high-risk bet: the talent is expensive and the learning curve is a wall. So why willingly sign off on a technology that makes recruiting harder? Because optimizing for cheap headcount is a false economy. This fast-paced session bridges the gap between engineering elegance and CFO mathematics. You will learn how to expose the "shadow payroll" of bloated polyglot teams, and leave armed with the exact financial vocabulary needed to prove that a lean, elite Scala team is the most aggressive risk-mitigation strategy a CTO can deploy.