scala.bythebay.io: Jamie Allen Interview
Recording: scala.bythebay.io: Jamie Allen Interview
you I'm Jamie Allen I'm the director of engineering for the unified commerce platform at starbucks back in 2009 i was working at a company called SI cadd CCAD which is a joint venture at the time between comcast and motorola and what we were building was the control systems the network management of all of the infrastructure for cable companies from satellite dish down to set top box we wanted to maintain a view of all of the streams all of the periodic s'what we call periodic data they could sent down things like your system clock and we wanted to build that using an actor representation and this was led by Michael pill quiz to a lot of people know from the schodack project and also simulacrum these are cats projects for encoding types in in type classes so we we started out using Scala on this project and it was very difficult there weren't a lot of books there was just oh Derr skis one programming in Scala book there were very few resources online but at the same time we were working in a very collaborative way we had a group of people who were high performing as a team and we found ways to solve problems together and we had a very patient environment one of the great things about working there at C cat is they knew that we were all learning a new language learning new techniques and asynchrony and concurrency and we were at her place where we weren't going to get in trouble for making a mistake that they were giving us the air cover to make sure that we could you know do things and not worry that people are going to come down on us if we did something wrong because it was kind of inevitable that we were going to stub our toes once or twice I remember I followed I started following pound Scala on on Twitter I joined twitter in like 2008 and just started trying to see what other people were talking about and that's how i found debashish ghosh his ruminations of a programmer blog reflected just a step ahead of where I was as a scholar developer and so it was extremely helpful for me understanding what was happening with these various language constructs that I'd never seen before up until that time I thought I was a decent developer I was sitting there doing my java my Maeve and my hibernate my you know spring and hmm I thought I was pretty good and what I found out and using Scala was that I knew nothing I knew nothing about programming language design knew nothing about types I knew nothing about functions and I really had to think deeply about what I didn't know and the interesting thing about that is that's never stopped I've been doing this now for seven years in Scala which is probably over around a third of my career and I still feel like I'm learning every day but I love it well I'm very lucky because it's starbucks were just getting started so I get to use whatever I want I don't have an ideal stack I don't I don't have a dogma about technology and that's interesting because i worked at life bending the company behind scala akka and play i want easier concurrency i want to have better resilience tools that let me solve those problems make me happy so you know if I can have correctness at compile time by leveraging types and type level programming and also at the same time have resilience because I layer actors a certain level in my system allowing me to have multiple nodes coordinating and abstracting locations of various values that makes me very happy but that can change and I don't define every problem the same way if I can avoid the complexity of having clustered nodes then I will certainly try to oh well I love Julie pits talks she's always really good and you know she does some very interesting stuff with Scala Jas I remember she did a hackathon that Alexei you know Scala by the way put together and it was really fascinating because you sit there you see people were you know writing code and a hackathon and let's face it we just we hacked things up all right you got to get stuff done in order to meet the deadline but the thing that I really admired about Julie is that she wrote not only really great functional code and solved a problem but she also wrote beautiful code like when we were looking at her Scala everybody on the judging team I wasn't one of the judges but everybody looking I was like as gorgeous so indistinct yourself I wish I could ride Scala okay right so I always liked her talks a lot and she's one of the keynote errs I enjoyed jhanda goes talk about co free that was a really good talk and in one of the really interesting things about that it's how he enumerated his various laws that he personally has about how he deals with correctness right so I thought there was a great list if you get a chance to see the video of that talk and you see the slide he has for how he thinks in terms of correctness I think it's a worth your time you