Scale By The Bay 2018: David Winters Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: David Winters Interview
Dave winters I work at GoPro title is big data architect and I live in Belmont California so we're building a data platform we've been building it for actually going on four years now I think the coolest thing about it is it's a very dynamic platform so as the data changes its able to adapt to the data and we're also evolving with the times and now machine learning is the course that the big excitement area everywhere and so now we're changing it from just a data platform but to more of a machine learning platforms make it easier for data scientists to collaborate on it I didn't fortunately like my three favorite topics too I mean they really are cuz I'm I'm a geek and I love just coding itself so anything related to software but architecture is where I've spent a lot of my time especially over the last five years and so I'm always interested in taking with a big-picture perspective but at the same time Big Data is my life I mean that's the the area I work in so I'll be honest I've gone to all three tracks and it's a it's a competition each time I look at the next session I'm like oh oh which one do I go to you have to fortunately I know they're all in YouTube so I'll be catching a lot of the talks afterwards I'm sure so I did best practices on real experience from from building the data platform I think the honestly the best practices are once you learn from mistakes always for my children or that but honestly where I've tried things and it didn't work and and you tried something else and I can usually tell when they're they're good best practices I was shared with people because they'll come up to me and talk to me later about it and they'll share the same ones and honestly one of the best ones I had today was someone came up to me and talked to me about a problem with basically how you manage tables and how they the same problem is me and we traded information saying we need to kind of figure this one out and hopefully in another year maybe I'll have some more information on that you can come back and talk about that well yeah I think it's kind of in the similar vein where you know I enjoy hearing the talks where people are actually talking about things that they've actually done and you know definitely anything that's related to building machine learning infrastructures these days because there's a lot of machine learning going on but I think a lot of times it seems like it's happening kind of in small silos and it's not being done on like a big platform so definitely anything related to that and you know mistakes people have made and things they learn from it would be would be great you know Scala I'd have to say like when I I've been fortunate I've been doing this for going on 25 years and program started programming in Java and actually one dot oh it was more playing around and then got really serious and like Java 1 1 & 1/2 and I'd have to say like when I was really first introduced to Scala and I'm a late entrant to Scala compared to a lot of people it's really owned in the last three years it really wasn't epiphany for me it was just a completely different way of thinking about programming the functional programming I had last done was like over 20 years before that in college and it was the first time where I really was like oh wow this really applies it applies perfectly to Big Data so you know Scala I think just keeps getting stronger with you in every release I think they're very innovative and very good at you know keeping their releases fresh and I think it just comes naturally people will you know like all of the people at this conference you know talk about the great success we've had with those projects and there'll be more and more people using it [Music] you know I my favorite thing is I've you know gone to a lot of conferences I've been fortunate to speak at a lot of conferences and I think this conference I don't think it's it's very different from other conferences I feel that it's more collegial that there's just so much interaction with other people and sharing of ideas everyone seems to be just really I think motivated by their passion of you know whatever it is they're they're working on and so I found that there's just so much more ideas sharing at this conference and any other conferences out there