In 2013-2014. I worked on a time-tracking webapp used in my company, in Java, and wanted to explore what else is there. Before that, I coded in Lua for a bit, and Scala caught my interest by being similar in some ways - Scala to Java relation seemed to be to be a bit like Lua to C++. Closely connected but more concise and higher level.
In 2016, I wrote my first big project in Akka, a sort of artificial neural network, and I talked about it at Scalar 2017. In 2017 I moved to Berlin to work at Wire where we developed an Android app, an encrypted messenger, in Scala 2.11.
I’ve never been a big FP fan. I like to keep things simple. FP both sometimes helps it, and sometimes makes it harder. So I like that Scala lets me but does not force me to use it.