scala.bythebay.io: Ascander Dost Interview
Recording: scala.bythebay.io: Ascander Dost Interview
cool so my name is asked underdose i am a lead software engineer at Salesforce IQ so I actually came into Scala from NLP and computational linguistics first so I specify I specialized in that did a lot of data science work and then ended up having to learn Scala for a job and realized that I loved it it was great it really let me get to writing code to do what I wanted instead of writing code to basically satisfy a bunch of boilerplate conditions and so it was super expressive and I kind of took to it right away and you know with tools like spark and some of the machine learning libraries that are out there it just makes it really really easy and really really fast to get up and running doing the sorts of things that I like to do [Music] it's a really good question so my ideal so I I don't know that there is an ideal stack I think it depends on what kind of problem you're trying to solve so for the kinds of problems that I'm trying to solve these days I think my ideal stack definitely involves Scala SPARC s3 has been working out great for us Cassandra for a database some kind of job scheduler so the schedulers that are out there right now I haven't found one that I really really like we've been using as Caban and it's you know it's it's okay but it's not great so and for sure any some kind of notebook and functionality we've also been pretty heavy users of data Breck's at Salesforce IQ and data Burke's has been awesome for us really great so that's my dream stack - the scheduler which I don't know what my dream scheduler would be probably something custom that works specifically for us but like we have not found that part yet so our actual stack does use SPARC Scala Cassandra s3 and data bricks for notebook I would love to be able to use core NLP but the licensing kind of makes it difficult for us to use that sales force and so yeah that's that's why I answered to that there's there's actually a lot going on at Salesforce right now and so like I've got a bunch of colleagues that are giving really interesting talks and day to day it's really sometimes hard to kind of keep tabs on what they're doing and follow up with them and so I'm definitely excited to see their talk to see what they've been working on because they're trying to solve a lot of problems that are very close to the sorts of problems that we're trying to solve and so it's always interesting to get somebody else's perspective there's also a couple of talks from people that I just recognize from reading blog posts and like looking at play boats and stuff like that it's just like really impressive how many of like what I consider to be like heavy hitters and the scala community giving talks here and so like I'm like oh you know so as I was giving a talk here I definitely want to go and check that out I might not get it but I just want to be exposed to it