Transcript: scale.bythebay.io: Tim Perrett Interview

[Music] tempura you want me to stop no no just say I'm tempura and head of infrastructure engineering of rice and labs and yeah for us I think it's um it's really a product of our scale and it's really the number of people we have an issue with an Conway's law essentially so different organizations doing different things so trying to be I guess unified about what we do and how we do it and provide some consistency for the groups particularly for me my customers are our internal developers so yeah so by and large our job is to try and make them successful doing whatever it is the company wants to do so I think um I think some of the bigger problems people often think about requests per second and other technical aspects of scaling and I think for us the bigger problem tends to be social and tends to be dealing with the developers on and how the organization is structured and how we can use infrastructure engineering make the rest of the team successful so by and large I think the challenges are getting people to accept new and automated ways of doing things even though it's a changed process and the process often it's removing process and having people build trust in technology I think those are some of the bigger challenges as you scale technology within a large organization like ours and so I think for the most part our think our systems are probably a few years ahead of what some other people are perhaps doing right now and so I think the technical aspects as they mature as they mature over time you know we will continue to harden and do the things that we do the systems but from again from sort of a social scale perspective I think you know our company is not getting smaller so you know I think those things will continue to continue to present some of the trickiest challenges as you define you know process and procedures around you know new more distributed systems universes of historical monolithic systems so I think that those probably continue to present the you know presenting the ongoing challenges I mean people are always the heart [Music] group our group is one of the one of the largest groups of groups of commercial functional programming particularly doing pure functional programming we've been doing it commercially for five or six years and our group has benefited I would propose immensely and simply because on twofold firstly that firstly from hiring perspective it's allowed us to hire set of people that are that think differently and secondly certain systems require a degree of rigor but you know if you don't have that it will cause side effects that are have a negative impact on the business and so having systems that are built in a rigorous fashion and in a hopeful way as such as they are when we use FP that has sort of benefited the business in a whole and whole way of sort of very tangible tangible manners particularly with cost reduction and maintenance over time it's probably the hallway track for a lot I've been doing Scullin FP for probably 10 years you know it's just great to meet other people and see friends who have known for a long time and hang out and geek out I suppose you