Scale By The Bay 2018: Adam Crane Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Adam Crane Interview
my name is Adam crane a company is twittered title they call me an SRE in theory and I'm from New York so right now I'm working on a thing that we're calling the network health visualizer it's a data pipeline for collecting a bunch of metrics and info about our internal networking and then surfacing that with graph QL API and a nice data visualizer component for people to query so programmatically and also exploratory like visual and yeah I work with Scala every day and you know the terminal point of any computer science student is the compiler on one end and distributed systems on the other end so you know obviously data floats somewhere in the middle so I think that's not impossible question to answer really best practices well I gave a talk about designing applications around graph QL as an anchor point so I guess the best practices that I'm trying to propagate are making you know we live in a world of data but we need to surface that data in an ergonomic way we need to make it easy for people to understand who have to make decisions with that data and we have to make those decisions fair and finally you know we just have to be more empathic with our user interfaces for working with the infrastructure because there are people staying up late all the time working on this stuff and you know if we make their lives better everyone's lives are better hoping to learn that is a great question I really wanted to learn about stream processing streaming data processing while I was here you know there's a lot of activity in that space pub/sub systems you know lamda execution where that lives what kind of guarantees people are ok with you know the role of batch data processes when we have exactly once execution guarantees on things yeah that's probably my biggest interest area this year that is a deep question I mean Scala was my entry point into functional programming you know I had known about some other languages more functional even than Scala in the past but I just never had the opportunity to use them in a production environment or have the time to sink into that so I do give Scala credit for that you know I'm hard core convert now the functional programming and strong typing community so I think we need to make that a lot better again we need to improve the ergonomics of type systems we need to improve our education of people it's really hard to teach people these concepts right now even smart people so we need to get better at that things or people that's that's a tough question a lot of hard questions today I should have checked my speaker notes beforehand well that's hard to say I mean the ambient chat is probably my favorite thing you know there are a lot of people here because it's kind of a pricey conference a lot of people here are already gainfully employed and being paid for by their companies but you know they still obviously have a good reason to be here and whether it's through obligation or voluntary I always want to find out people's angle you know find out what they're really working on what they're really what's really bugging them you know that they might be reticent to talk about it first because those are the things that I think have the most value at a conference like this they're things we don't always readily talk about in lieu of things that are more attractive for conference talks but the things we need to have a lot more back and forth in the industry about you know cultural processes organizational processes the role of the tech industry economic processes