Holden Karau is a transgendered software developer from Canada currently living in San Francisco. Holden graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2009 with a Bachelors of Mathematics in Computer Science. She currently works as a Software Development Engineer at Google. She has worked at Foursquare, where she was introduced to Scala. She worked on search and classification problems at Amazon. Open Source development has been a passion of Holden's from a very young age, and a number of her projects have been covered on Slashdot. Outside of programming, she enjoys playing with fire, welding, and dancing. You can learn more at her website ( http://www.holdenkarau.com), blog (http://blog.holdenkarau.com), and github (https://github.com/holdenk).