The Rock the JVM Story

The one-liner

Rock the JVM aims to be the go-to resource for learning Scala, Akka, Spark and everything JVM. Everything is battle-tested on yours truly.

The reasonably short version

I’m Daniel Ciocîrlan, a developer and teacher from Bucharest, Romania. I’ve started Rock the JVM to share everything that I learned through pain, blood, sweat and tears and distill everything in action-packed courses with a smooth learning curve. Since 2013, I’ve been teaching a variety of programming topics to people all over the world and at every level of the game, from senior engineers processing trillions of data points to 7-year-olds moving spaceships on the screen.

At first, I mastered Java, then I taught it for 3.5 years to university students. I found Scala 7 years ago when a good friend told me about functional collections. I was blown away, and still am to this day as I discover more of the Scala magic. The rabbit hole only went deeper from there: I learned Akka with my own small projects, then Spark and big data while at Palantir. I left Palantir in mid 2019, but it’s very likely my old pipelines are still crunching data every day, as we speak.

I hope you enjoy my material - in the meantime, I’ve just started on Twitter and would love to meet you!

A bit more

I spend most of my time between Scala, Akka and Spark, and I’m really fortunate I get to work with them and teach them to other developers. I love the expressiveness and the concise power of a good technology. I learn from the community and the people I’ve had in my courses and I love to share back what I’ve learned. I love to speak at meetups and conferences and I adore people’s faces when something really hard “clicks” in their mind and their face lights up. I don’t know how people react to my online courses in real time, but I love the “this changed my life” comments. I’ve graduated from University Politehnica of Bucharest with a BSc and a MSc in Computer Science. My Bachelor and Master thesis were on quantum computation, of all things. That can be explained by the fact that I was really into physics before - I was winning medals at international physics competitions. When I’m not coding, I dance salsa and bachata and I tend to play an absurd amount of Ed Sheeran on my acoustic guitar.

I’m always there to help if you need anything.