scala.bythebay.io: James Ward Interview
Recording: scala.bythebay.io: James Ward Interview
you yeah I'm James Ward I'm a platform evangelist at salesforce com right now focused on Kafka and machine learning stuff so I started getting into Scala maybe six or seven years ago because dick wall and Diane Marsh were doing presentations about Scala back before many people are using it and I really respect both of those people and was like laughs they think this is great then I got to check it out and so I I went to some presentations and then started writing some Scala code with play framework 10 back when that was around and really enjoyed the experience but it was also a pretty hard learning curve for me I had to really switch my brain from this object-oriented way of thinking into a functional way of thinking and I wasn't really used to that and so so it was a challenge there's definitely a big learning curve but now i'm loving scala and and so glad that I took the time to learn it so I get to work with with some really fun technology at Salesforce and I would say that that quite a bit of it is my ideal stack so it's my ideal stack and my actual stack so I use Salesforce for my back office data obviously it work at Salesforce so but it really does work really well for back office types of applications and managing that data I use Heroku for my front end application so anything that's customer facing I run on Heroku and then of course run Scala they're using play framework for the web framework and then database wise there's a really cool technology called haruka connect that synchronizes data between Salesforce and Heroku so it makes it really easy to share data across that that boundary so so I love that part of the stack and then just beginning to add in new things into that stack like prediction I 0 for machine learning and Kafka for doing like etl is and stream processing that kind of stuff so so yeah I mean I have my ideal stack it's working really well and and excited about building more on that and and adding more things in like spark and Cassandra and those sorts of things over time so I think that's kind of some of my missing pieces right now is is more on the the data analytics side and on the big data storage side of the two pieces that I'm still hoping that i can add into my stack yeah so there is a guy here named Gilbert who created play framework and really looking forward to not only catching up with him but also here in his talk because he always just blows my mind and expands it and so this time he's doing a talk on doing assembly programming inside a scala and i have no idea what that's going to look like but really interested to see him gonna blow my mind again so yep yeah really looking forward to guillaume boards talk you