Scale By The Bay 2018: Cody Allen Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Cody Allen Interview
Cody and I live in Sunnyvale Justin South Bay and I'm machine learning engineer at Salesforce so I'm building intelligence insights on activity data which is like emails meetings that sort of thing to try to help make it easier for salespeople and their managers to kind of make the right decisions and see what where they are in the different stages of their sales pipelines and stuff to me the coolest thing about it is really my teammates they're very smart we have some similar interests but different backgrounds so there's there's a lot to learn I find myself pretty evenly split between the functional track and the data track yeah I've been doing functional programming for quite some time have kind of recently gotten more into the data world and both of them have topics that really interested me so in my talk I talked about shapeless and basically the best practice that I'm trying to get across with that one is when there's information that is known at compile time but it's kind of getting thrown away and so you don't actually see the type safety that you would expect then see if see if you can bring in some of that maybe with shapeless maybe with something else and get some of those compile time guarantees that you that can make you feel comfortable with your code yeah the best practice I'm trying to learn are basically the merging of the functional programming side of things and the machine learning side of things as I mentioned I've been doing functional programming for a while I'm new to the data science side of things and when I see a lot of you know like data science tutorials and that sort of thing they seem pretty far away from functional programming but there are a lot of people here who are doing both of those things together and I think there's a lot for me to learn about that [Music] so for me Scala provided a bridge from the object-oriented Java code that I was working on into a functional programming paradigm and for me that's been a total paradigm shift for how I think about programming I used to spend a lot of time trying to make sure that I had the right architecture of these complex inheritance hierarchies because it it felt like if you didn't get it right then like the slightest change comes in and everything kind of crumbles and I find that now when I'm writing things in a more functional way I can I don't really have to try to have it all figured out ahead of time I can kind of fill in some types that I know will kind of make sense and then just kind of compose a bunch of pieces together and I don't have to have the whole thing in my head at the same time I have a lot of favorite people at scale by the bay so that's a tough one but I was say in general just seeing all these people who are getting excited about functional programming and data and people who are willing to take time to share some of the stuff that they're doing with others I really enjoy that and I'm hoping that they're also a lot of people who are kind of new to this that are learning this stuff and that I'll get a see in the community in the future you