scala.byethebay.io: Brennan Saeta Interview
Recording: scala.byethebay.io: Brennan Saeta Interview
you hi my name is Brennan sada and I'm an engineer at Coursera course eras mission is universal access to the world's best education so I work on building a scalable platform so learners everywhere can take a whole range of courses from our worldwide university partners i [Music] started in scala when i was working in a c++ project for an assignment in my undergrad course we had thousands upon thousands of lines of C++ and I thought that we could definitely do better at the time Martin Road our ski came to speak at a scala conference at Stanford and I went and heard him and that was enough to get me to check it out and so over my winter vacation I decided to reimplement tens of thousands of lines of C++ into Scala in fact it was only about 300 lines of Scala as a result and from there I was just totally hooked I built a number of personal projects in Scala using a play framework and eventually converted Coursera one hundred percent over to scala on the back end I think that technology today is moving in a number of key trends in addition to scaling up the data set size we're also seeing a decrease in the amount of latency that is available to run ever more complex systems I think streaming systems real-time data reactive are very important technology trends that are important to take advantage of I think Scala is a powerful language with within to work on these systems because it is such a flexible powerful general-purpose language today Coursera the stock I work in is one hundred percent Scala on the back end we're very proud of that we use non-blocking i/o where we use reactive systems built on top of the play framework and we're already doing some of the advanced technology work required to power a learning platform I think where we need to go is need to make systems even more real-time and there's some exciting challenges we're working on in that direction I've really enjoyed a number of talks already at the conference learning about learning again why hire kinda types are so useful and a number of very advanced type type features but also on a very different note learning about how graph ql works very well with scala and how it works very well to build products as quickly and effectively as possible which is very important for a fast growing fast moving company be it a start-up or a large enterprise you