scala.bythbay.io: Davis Sheperd Interview

Recording: scala.bythbay.io: Davis Sheperd Interview

you my name is David Shepherd i'm a senior engineer at netflix so i started working with scala when i first came in contact with spark so I was mostly using Scala as a way to interface with spark and right spark jobs and you know sort of taken by the you know the sort of the type safe you know closures that you could define inside of Scala as well as sort of the higher higher order functions you could define so mostly was just sort of kind of dipping my toes in the water working the spark and then when i moved to netflix i eventually really needed to dig into scala so i bought a collection of books for most was the odr ski book and sort of hammered through them and yeah the rest is history actually know what I want um yeah you know I mean always depends on the problem I think the problem that we're sort of dealing with in personalization first and foremost is flexibility you know we're constantly dealing with changing requirements so we need a language that can support those can support a myriad of changes you know while remaining you know relatively free of defects and scala's sort of very flexible type system really kind of any of those that and so I think where we're at now is pretty close to where we want to be which is enabling that flexibility and safety oh man I really love the functional programming track and it's been a lot of fun it's been very pragmatic you know I think Scala has had a lot of success in bringing functional paradigms into a more pragmatic environment you know much less so than more stalwart languages like Haskell and so it's been really really enjoyable to see a lot of these sort of pragmatic approaches to incorporating functional paradigms into otherwise sort of banal programming problems so yeah I've really enjoyed the functional track so most the toxin functional track today really looking forward to [Music]