Andy Hull of Sungevity, Q&A with Alexy Khrabrov of SF Scala @Sungevity 20150224
Recording: Andy Hull of Sungevity, Q&A with Alexy Khrabrov of SF Scala @Sungevity 20150224
hello everybody this is sf scala developer series and we're on location tonight at sanjevity where we run a safe scholar meetup with several east bay speakers and here with us we have andy hull who is the director of engineering at sangevity and he will speak about how sanjeevity uses scala so first i will ask hi india uh it's great to be here uh thanks for having us uh what is longevity sungevity is i guess a residential solar company we're also a technology company so we write a lot of software here it's central to to everything we do our goal is to get clean solar energy onto as many rooftops in the world as possible that's great i mean this is really i think something everybody can identify with as you know or you know common goal clear environments really great to have this company in our technology orbit so i guess it's natural question how do you guys use color how does skull help this clean energy go to to be implemented well we're just about to release the second version of our customer experience software platform so that's a that's a rich customer experience that helps our customers understand the financial and environmental payoffs of going with solar we also um we bring our customers into kind of a community so it's about community building for us and really engaging with them throughout the lifetime of them being a customer because they're a customer with us for 20 years we want to make sure that we offer a product that is all about trust and people understand exactly what it is that they're getting great and what made you guys choose scala as a programming language for this software that is a very interesting question i was involved in i was interested in scholar back in about 2009 2010 and i worked with play one play one scholar implementation which had a little to be desired but it was interesting it was a nice product um and some colleagues of mine ended up here and so that that kind of seed of scarliness kind of ended up at centrality and i joined shortly afterwards so it was uh it was a decision about what's uh what's an effective application server platform to build on we were using it essentially the first version was a um was a web application and then we've migrated to using uh players an api platform that's interesting so actually this is interesting because i'm uh at nitro which also started with play one and it was its entry way into scholar and then uh it got uh folks work with the community and then kind of a lot of new technologies came through that such as akka and then play two and everything else so do you see something similar to that you know kind of upgrading and using more and more of different sky technologies definitely we're um we're very much into the type safe stack we you know we use play two um we're looking at akka in uh probably the second half of this year for some interesting projects we use spt we use slick we we're using reactive on our next project so we're pretty into into the sky community in terms of what it can do for us great it's also great to hear about the reactive reactive uh approach uh because it really helps uh so uh so i understand basically you have your customer experience where are they coming from is it the mobile application is it the web uh can you talk a little bit more about it actually the um the platform that we built had is genesis in servicing a web application sorry a mobile application and we've currently been building out the api to support the full web application so it's for us it's about having the the ability to offer a lot of functionality on whatever device we choose okay that's great uh and uh obviously we have a lot of developers in the subscriber meet up and this is the first time actually we run a meetup in oakland so we're very excited to be here and you know find the you know uh skull company kind of uh in this bay uh and what what are you looking for you know from from scholar you know we can kind of you know start this partnership what what's you know uh connections with skull community uh would work best for longevity we're looking to be part of that community i think that's the important thing we want people to know that we um we're a software company as well as being a you know a solar company so you know we're both things we write a lot of software here but we want to be part of that community we want to contribute we want to take value from it we want to share okay so i guess since a lot of uh typesafe technologies are open source you guys are contributing to this open source you're gonna use it we we're not contributing yet although we have a couple of projects that we're looking to contribute uh independently of typesafe we spent a bunch of time building a very interesting siren api and we've built um parses for siren essentially so we're pretty cool we're pretty excited about that and we have a test framework that we're looking to open source in the near future well that's great i think that you know one of the talks today with bill vendors is like really you know related to testing so that will be great to see and you know we also do a lot of hackathons and uh various events so definitely would be great to do a hackathon with you guys and kind of uh things centered around open source uh so another thing we do is uh scalab by the bay conference i know just last year we had a lot of folks from saint gervais attending i wonder how did this go for you guys you know what did you learn and uh what are you looking for in this year's scholar by the bay uh we had a lot of fun at scallop by the bay we came we came away with a lot of interesting ideas um we really enjoyed um the finagle presentation about the way that twitter composes their services that was of media value to us and there was an amazing library whose name escapes me rapture which we actually immediately came back with and built into one of our tools so uh yeah we we really enjoyed our time at scala by the way well this is great to hear because you know we will actually have a rapture workshop on march 19th where john parity will actually lead the interactive session in the rebel in addition to his uh uh kind of trademark one-liner talk and now we'll get this chance actually all this and in terms of finale we're actually working with twitter to have a whole finagle track at next column by the way so you know full day workshop with uh hands-on training on finagle and actually talks about finagle so hopefully we'll add even more to to this knowledge and you guys can can definitely learn more at skull by the way well great thanks for having us and we're looking forward to your talk tonight thanks so much welcome you