Scale By The Bay 2018: Avi Bryant Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Avi Bryant Interview
you so I'm avi I'm an engineer at stripe and I live on Galiano Island which is a small island about 20 miles off the coast of Vancouver in Canada so the so the thing that I'm building is a system called Rainier which is a Bayesian inference system for Scala and I think one thing that's that's been cool and a lot of fun about working on the system for me is that to build it I've had to learn a lot about statistics but also a lot about compilers and generating JVM bytecode and sort of you know everything in between and so it's it's a very nice kind of full stack integrated system that's been on a really steep learning curve for me and and I think you know that ends up capturing a lot of value for other people I think a lot of my work has been at the intersection of programming and data pipelines and so the talks and the data pipelines track have definitely been the most directly relevant to me but I'm also very passionate about programming and programming languages and the ways that those two things can intersect I don't know that I have any best practices to share I think I'm probably somebody who has has systematically avoided a lot of best practices um I'm I'm very bad at testing and writing tests even though I understand the value you know I'm very bad at documenting my code even though I understand the value and no I think to the extent that I've been successful writing software it's been in spite of any best practices rather than because of it yeah I don't know I don't know that I come here to learn best practices I come here to see what exciting things other people are thinking about and to learn about concepts much more than than practices so I came to work at Twitter in 2010 and at that time I had spent the previous 10 years working mostly in small talk and more generally in a lot of dynamically typed languages and I knew very little about functional programming I knew very little about sort of sophisticated static type systems and Scala at Twitter was a huge eye-opener for me and really was an inflection point for my career as a software developer in that I shifted dramatically from working sort of exclusively in in highly dynamic languages to working in in Scala and I've spent you know the last eight years working pretty much exclusively in Scala and I think as I get older very much appreciating the support of a good static type system as my kind of working memory gets worse and so you know I I think it's kind of like the line about you know if if you're a you're not a liberal at at twenty you you have no heart and if you not a conservative at forty you have no head or something which i think is ridiculous but you know there may be some equivalent saying about if you're not a dynamic language programmer at twenty you something but you know but you're 40 you need it because your memory is a lot worse so anyway I think that's the Scala has been an extremely valuable tool for me in the last eight years and I expect that to be even more so in the next ten years coming to something like scale by the way is is definitely about the people for me because I live somewhere so remote conferences like this are one of my best opportunities to really connect with other people in my industry and so I always look forward to the hallway track more than any of the sessions and really all of the attendees it's it's great to see you