scala tristan interview 1 26 16
Recording: scala tristan interview 1 26 16
hello everybody I'm Alexa crabber of the organizer of SF scholar and here we are on location Rep media where we have a meetup theme there are archived have excellent arca talks and the first talk is by Tristan Tannen a web services consultant I'll consistent thank you so I've seen that you know you're basically talking about building service table in in Scala using akka and we have really huge meet up tonight so people are responding to this all right why do you think we have so many folks lining up to to learn about this it's a really good question I think it's because we are able to combine a couple of really interesting topics when we look at implementing something like a distributed hash table mm-hmm there's the good old-fashioned computer science there's scholar functional programming and ARCA and when you throw them all together you get an opportunity to work on a problem that you don't really get to see in your day-to-day work you know it's not just a crowd application it's it's not even a graphics engine you're actually starting to think about how a ever-changing system ever-changing network of nodes can work together to store a massive data structure I think that's a fascinating problem and what makes a good choice for the disability system you are described I think it's a good choice because it's very message oriented hmm and so when you take a protocol like code which is the one that I'm talking about tonight in my talk it's described in terms of messages that are sent between nodes in the system and using a programming language and framework that works with that rather than against it makes it much easier to reason about what's happening in the system and it provides guarantees in terms of your system design that you don't get when you're using say bsd sockets in the c++ environment interesting and how did you come to learn and use acha what was your scholar Lauren trajectory well I started tinkering with Scala I'd say tinkering probably around May last year mm-hmm I finished up in a permanent role working on messaging gateway and decided I need to learn some menu so started looking at scholar I picked up the reactive programming course or Sarah mm-hmm it's a bit of a deep dive and that's what really inspired me to do it after finishing key value store assignment mm-hmm as part of that course I thought okay time to take cord which is something that I'd learned about my lies at University and see how it applies in this new world cool then what were your experience is going to really highlights you know how would you characterize this you know usership scala to build this code you smart at 6p somebody else who may think about learning is gone that is a good question because it hasn't always been easy when I first started looking at scala I found it quite confusing I came from C++ and Java at that point and especially once I started looking at our corel just getting used to the semantics around messaging did take a little while but once I learnt them they started to feel like second nature not just in a learning tolerated sort of way but really learning to wield it as a very powerful tool mm hmm interesting so and as I understand you are kind of full stack worksource consultant so this is a full stack development is the theme of this year NSF scala so what would be your choice of choice when you build full-blown web app using scholar and what are your recommendations for folks who are basically getting into this like how should somebody try you know try this out building a false step about but my recommendation when approaching any project like that is try to go with what most popular because especially when you're learning a new technology you're going to have probably hundreds of questions by the time you build it a real competency in it and using something that other people have already used and already hundred with just eases some of that initial pain that you'll go through learning so if you want you know like if somebody that's specifically okay i'm gonna use skull on the back and what we'll do suggest to use on the front end and you know which kind of way to build an API say that he should do in scala we just need somebody asking for specific advice well on on the back end I would definitely say I choose something like play you don't want to be too creative there mm-hmm there's a lot of community support around it on the front end I find that harder to make a call with because there are literally hundreds of JavaScript libraries personally I'd love to start looking at things like Scala Jas myself mm-hmm but haven't had the opportunity to so I guess angular wouldn't be a bad choice hmm but I definitely have to bite my tongue a little bit on on jumping to any conclusions there okay yeah I mean not a bad choice I think it's a good choice for the JavaScript land oh crap so angular comes up so that's that's kind of good good confirmation and i'll wrap with kind of question about australian the developer community we don't often get folks here from from australian and kind of you know we had thoughts from nick de in Sydney a while ago and I know like things changing Australia and there are lots of default come spread around so well how we characterize kind of feel melbourne scholar community with trans do see you know which is the insert option in terms of jobs you can kind of tell us about a little bit about the skull scene can you leave it okay so the way i found the skull is saying in melbourne is that it's still getting off the ground there's definitely this core contingency of programmers who are really interested in doing their jobs better and that's what's inspiring them to look at technologies like scholar but we haven't quite got the momentum behind it for larger companies to say we are going to build all about tech in scala it's usually one or two smaller teams which have already built up the trust of say the CTO or or a program manager who are allowed to experiment with it and even then it's usually in a microservices environm when the risk is considered quite low so we've got a lot of long way to go but we do have a gradually strengthening meetup group they're routinely get 35 people there which is nice to see and with bigger companies like Rea just real estate Australia mm-hmm starting to use scholar I think it's going to become probably as big as Ruby eventually all right here's to it so let's you know let's see how this in develops and I hope we can make a connection of our folks in October and forth and we're looking forward to talk thanks