Scale By The Bay 2018: Brian Cantrill Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Brian Cantrill Interview
yeah I'm Brian Cantrell I'm the CTO of Julian which is a company owned by Samsung and I live in Piedmont California nice back um let's see right now we are we're a cloud computing company so we build both a storage substrate which we call mantle which is look at s3 as well as a compute substrate that we one can use for cloud computing workloads as it turns out there's a lot that's interesting about both of those problems especially when you push them out to the margin and you care about extraordinary levels of scale levels of performance levels of reliability throughput and so on there are a bunch of interesting problems that that come out of the word abrooke some days it feels like too many interesting problems but it feels like there are it's remarkable how many problems you only see when you get to a certain level of dimension and not because that dimension is necessarily required for the problem but simply when you have that much more of a surface area you're more likely to encounter these incredibly strange and honestly somewhat delightful issues I mean they're very interesting technologically you know I was in the functional track which is intriguing to me I haven't really done a whole lot in functional languages Stephani intriguing I mean I'm a programmer on the sovereign chair or I do our architecture honestly these things are all kind of intriguing the data pipelines thing is is is not something I've done historically but I'm interested in I mean I think one of things that is that I like about software engineers in general is we tend to be a pretty curious Bunch so honestly there's a lot of value in all those tracks from me well so today I was talking about my recent love affair with rust and the you know the the best practice that I think rust enforces is I've always been a big believer in being thoughtful about the way you develop your software and rust really enforces that whether you like it or not rust shifts the cognitive load from the software running in production to the developer in development which can be a challenge but I think yields much better artifacts ultimately and you know I like learning about folks that are doing kinds of software that are totally foreign to me and there's a lot of that here there's a lot of very different kinds of systems I mean I've my career has been in infrastructure software cloud computing software and this is really there's a lot of different kind of software here so I just hope to learn something about a domain that I that I don't know much about so I'm not a Scala programmer at all actually I've never written a line of Scala my wife I actually happened just like by accident to have seen what must have been one of the very first Scala presentations in what must been 2004 and it was I thought it was intriguing I thought was interesting but I am not at all a Scala person I think what Scala does point us to I mean I've always been I think what I'm what's interesting about Scala is that it took some core values around expressiveness around the ability to compose composability and coupled that with the interoperability with Java to do something really interesting a novel and I think that there's there lessons to be drawn there I don't know degree that I'm ever going to implement and Scala but I think that there's some really interesting lessons there to be drawn by other other languages other environments you know I think we had a great panel last night that was a lot of fun we had a we had I think what five technologists on the panel really interesting crew across a whole bunch of different systems done a whole bunch of different things and it's very inspiring to sit with people who have built really big real interesting systems especially when they're totally foreign in some regards and you can just appreciate this kind of this wonderful thing that's been built that you didn't really know anything about before