Rúnar is a software engineer in Boston, an author of a book, Functional Programming in Scala, and an occasional speaker on topics in functional programming.

Rúnar received his education in computer programming and electrical engineering at the Reykjavík Technical College in Iceland. In the intervening decades he has done diverse programming work, including antivirus research, software for agriculture and animal breeding, real estate, IT, finance, and genomics. Meanwhile, he has worked with many programming languages including Pascal, C, Java, Haskell, Scala, and Ruby, and made some of his own.