About the Author

Christian Ekrem is a Staff Engineer with over 12 years of experience building production systems at scale. He works daily in a production Elm codebase with over 125,000 lines of code at Lovdata, Norway’s leading legal information provider. This real-world experience—not just toy projects—informs every comparison and recommendation in this book.

His journey spans multiple platforms and languages: six years at Vipps MobilePay (Norway’s leading mobile payment platform) working across backend development in Go and React, Android development in Kotlin, and eventually becoming the first engineer to work across both simultaneously. This diversity gives him a unique perspective on what makes code maintainable and genuinely better.

Christian’s background extends beyond tech—he’s taught at a special-needs high school and worked as a film director. This varied experience taught him how to explain complex concepts clearly and meet people where they are, which is exactly what this book aims to do for React developers learning Elm.

Why this book exists: Christian believes Elm is the fastest way for developers to truly learn functional programming. Whether you adopt Elm professionally or not, learning it will make you a better developer in any language. This book is his way of sharing that insight with React developers ready to level up.

You can read more of his writing on technology and functional programming at cekrem.github.io.