Scale By The Bay 2018: Brian Clapper Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Brian Clapper Interview
yeah I my name is Brian clapper I currently work for data bricks I'm in their education department so I spend a lot of my time writing curriculum I'm doing the kind of back-end support for the courses that we teach and I am based outside Philadelphia oh I build a lot of different things I've got some open-source libraries that to my surprise a few people actually use I spend a lot of my time these days in spark because I work for a big data spark company and the coolest thing about everything that I'm working on it really is the coolest thing about the community for me which is I like hanging around people who make my brain hurt it'll make me work and this community has consistently provided that level of cognitive discomfort in a good way ever since I started using Scala so everything I build and everything I use and everything I have a chance to play with is all toward that at all trying to keep me learning and that's I don't even really care what I'm working on as long as what I'm doing forces me to learn yeah I can't pick one they're all interesting so I thought I spoke in one of them but I mean they all interest me that's the again that's the nature of this community it's it's eclectic and and there's something in nearly every track here that is fascinating and something I need to learn that I don't already know well for me it was mostly you know we were talking about spark and the use of three different api's in spark the data frames the data sets and the frameless API and for me one of the things I wanted to convey is that as a scholar programmer and one of the best practices is to use the kind of really cool type safety that you get out of these add-on projects like frameless so that was essentially what my talk was about you know a compare and contrast and the best practice coming out of that is when to use each of these individual things and when to be careful I I think for me what I would hope to learn more about because this is an area that I I need to grow in I'd like to learn more about best practices that with type level programming in category theory so that's essentially where I'm trying to focus my time at the conference is talks that will help my brain hurt there in a way that that helps my skills and understanding of those techniques growth yeah I don't know if I can answer the second thing I don't know that I I feel knowledgeable enough to one of the things I've learned is that I'm really lousy at predicting but I can tell you how it changed my life I came into Scala oddly through Python I had spent nine years doing almost nothing but Java and I was getting really tired of the verbosity of the language as much as I enjoyed using the JVM I was tired of Java I went to a startup where everything was done in Python and for about two or three months it was great it was a nice terse language that was expressive and easy to use and about three months in I started to get annoyed everything brand more slowly I missed my types I wanted a language that was terse expressive and even though I didn't know to say it at the time I wanted the language that was more functional I wanted the JVM back because I got speed well while still getting portability and happen to be griping about that to somebody some day and he said you know it sounds like what you want to try is Scala this was back at the Scala 2/7 era there weren't that many scholar books out I was reading this staircase book to learn the language I formed the user group shortly after I started learning the language mostly to try to find people in the Philadelphia area who were also trying to learn this language because of that user group I fell into organizing an East Coast conference with the New York and the Boston guys and all of that has changed everything for me it's changed the way I look at it's changed the kind of people I hang out with it's changed the way I think about solving problems and it's gotten me involved in a community that continually it's full of great people and I continually feel like I am growing you know as a technical person so it's it's hard for me to quantify exactly how it's changed things for me but it's changed everything for me I would say I'm going to focus on the people I've been in the scholar community long enough now since about 2011 that I've gotten to know you know a lot of the people in the community so for me it's partly about the talks but it's also partly about reconnecting with people that I just enjoy being around you know there this is a great group of people it's a it's a wonderful community uh very welcoming community I'm privileged enough now having helped organize you know the conference on the East Coast for going on eight years I've gotten to know a lot of people in the community better and I just it's a chance to reconnect with with people I don't get a chance to see very often all right that's terrific and I get to learn some things on top of all that so you know what's not to like you