Scale By The Bay 2018: Bill Venners Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Bill Venners Interview
my name is Bill Boehner's company art tema and title is I'm the president I run the company and I live in one that Creek California which is east of San Francisco not too far from here anyone I'm building is it is a company kind of because I do management and we have do consulting so we have people in different places and there is one client I help with but I'm supposed to just do management but I do you know look at code and think about it and talk about and give my opinion and then the source code that I actually get to build is open source so I'm still doing working on Scala tests so it's open source software what's really cool about I guess like the difference there is you get paid to do like client work that's cool but open source you get to actually I think have a larger effect on the world like you can really try new things and see if people like it and really actually make the world of programming better through open source things you give away and I see it kind of as a as a way to do volunteer work you know it's a way to give back so that's really neat to have both of those like there's a way to make money in software there's also a way to make a difference in the large open source you mean are those three tracks at this conference because they're called data reactive and something functional yeah but anyway I don't know I I think I like all of them but what what I thought really struck me that was it was interesting was new things you know like there was some talks on quantum computing what's like so different I want to go see I couldn't go watch the first one cuz we were giving our talk during that time but I'm going to see the next one and then there's one on programmable money you know like blockchain kind of stuff so that that's kind of what's interesting it's not just one of those categories but it's what's the latest and what's new oh yeah that's what our talk was about effective Scala is just a 40 minute opinionated talk on best practices in Scala so the the that talk is in theory a book coming that we're going to write which we haven't really started but we had did create a workshop so we give up this two-day effective Scala workshop which is two days of best practice that you know I think after 10 years of experience with Scala which we actually have over 10 years now you know the community and we have formed opinions on what is a better way to use it so that's what we do it's effective Scala probably more functional hardcore functional things I don't think because we had to miss the first two days of this conference because we were doing a training but and there wasn't too much on the schedule today but that's what I'm you know I haven't gone that far in that heaven jumped off that it's not a cliff but you know like diving board into the you know so I want to I I I'm kind of interested in in those basically its again it's new things to me that's what I'm interested in learning about best practices as well okay it definitely changed my life or became I changed my life to it or something because I started in 20 2007 working on the Scala book with Martin Adair ski and Lex Boone and then too because they knew Scala pretty well Martin of course wrote Scala and then Lex was in his group you know in at his school it was like PhD post I think was opposed talk there but I didn't know it and so I started writing the Scala test just to get you know something some experience with Scala and that took over my life so I spent you know my whole like all my free time is now doing this open source project and then you know ice to cut scala consulting so I make a living that way so it really did change my life in a great way and then what's really nice is the community been really fun to be a part of because it's it's it's a lots of different people with different perspectives trying different things coming together confidence like this and sharing and like arguing and that's really been very stimulating and it's still stimulating that what's with one time I heard like it was years ago someone say that Scala is still a small enough community to such that as conferences are still interesting so so for the like the next 15 years I hope that stays true so I'll always tried to balance but it always tried to balance like something that can be practical to use in production something for real with let's try to move the art forward and make things better so that's like the whole way that Scotty Dada yeah Scala 3 has kind of been you know Martin went off a few years back and just said I'm gonna try to make the type system simpler I'm gonna try to get a a theoretical foundation that proves the type system is sounds it's gonna do all this stuff off to the side and now we're trying to bring it together in a way that actually Scala's user base which is pretty large now can actually migrate to and I think one other thing the other one other thing I would mention that I think was neat is originally like one of the things we talked about in our talk is that skull is not just does it wasn't originally designed to be a Haskell on the JVM and some people who came from that world really wanted to just use it that way and it was flexible enough to be used that way and there was always kind of one of the passions in our community was like you know this well I was trying to say tensions but there's this son of like we do it want to do it this way when I do that way kind of thing but what's call a three I mean what happened is everybody kind of kept stayed together and and now it's called a three there's a lot of things going into it that to make sure that that also works you know so that's still inclusive and so I Matt's what I'm hoping that we can keep keep both of those things going that we care about it being used in real the real-world projects but we still move the art forward and we actually are including different people's perspectives and making sure they're taken care of oh it's guys kale by the bay yeah I don't know I think I always liked the seeing the people but I know I mean I've known people in this community for a long time so you know it's just I enjoy coming over here I wish I could've come all three days this this year I couldn't but but yeah it's a great conference and I don't know what's different about it I it's you know there's a few bears booths there but they're interesting people - it's not like a marketing commercially thing it's really programmers getting together and talking so I think that's what I guess I described it as this one it's nice like that