Scale By The Bay 2018: Paul Snively Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Paul Snively Interview
I'm Paul Snively I'm with formation I'm a senior software engineer and I live in Asheville North Carolina what am i building well I'm building a personalized ad technology platform that we contract with several clients to help them with their loyalty programs in particular what's the coolest thing about it I think the coolest thing about it from a feature standpoint is that it offers customers the opportunity to engage in a multi-step process that increases their appreciation and success getting in getting what they want from our clients and helps our clients of course with revenue from a technical perspective what's coolest about it is we're using a combination of Haskell and Scala we're doing a lot of functional programming and we're making pretty sophisticated use of some pretty cutting-edge technology that some of my colleagues have talked about here like the doll language for configuration and things like that well that's a really hard question it's it's really hard to separate them especially these days I think because you can't really separate out especially if you're doing functional programming you can't really separate out okay the functional tract from the data track for example if if you're doing machine learning at all you you are going to benefit a lot from the data track if you're a functional program or if you're just curious about functional programming you're going to benefit from the functional tract so it's it's really hard to say I think just the way it's played out for me this year I've spent most of my time on the data track best practices well I'm I personally and formation as a company are very committed to purely functional programming there are technical reasons for that and aesthetic reasons for that so to me best practice is sort of by definition means the things that are going to help you write correct code but also maintainable code code that is not only functionally correct but that other people can understand and my presentation here today in fact very shortly is really about that that intersection the intersection of functional correctness and legibility maintainability I'm really interested in data management at extreme scale because I think you know I think most developers today are in a position where they have to deal with increasing amounts of data in more or less real time and that has just huge infrastructure challenges which some of the other presenters here have discussed it in some length so I think the thing that I'm coming away with most is an appreciation of some of the challenges inherent in large-scale data management and doing that reliably and cleanly yeah really great question and and it's it's injury that's interesting for me to reflect here at this point personally because my son is one of the volunteers here and he works at Twilio using Scala so it's it's literally a father-son thing for us at this point and Alexi has proposed maybe some sort of larger discussion with some combination of family members who are both in the industry to to discuss that you know at some length so for me it's personally it's an opportunity to apply some of the functional programming ideas that I've always been interested in technically I've been very fortunate to do Scala professionally for about eight years now and for the next 15 boy it's hard to say when you look at the landscape and you see the rise of things like pure script on the front end type script reason ml if you squint at rust you can see it as a functional programming language and there are some libraries very similar to libraries that are available for Scala that help make it even more useful as a functional language so I think the next 15 years we're going to see the continuation of the trend of acceptance and functional programming and in particular it's going to be very exciting to see what happens with the evolution of the so-called systems programming languages like rest and Swift and so things were people gosh well I just just earlier took pictures and shared them on Twitter of Brian clapper and Rin RB Arneson and Paul Chi Asano and John is area talking on one side and Martin rotor ski and Rob Norris and oh gosh and I'm forgetting one now but a similar group on the other side all within a you know radius of about three feet four feet and you know that's that's a lot of you know like I said on Twitter the bus factor there is an incalculable you know this is it's just an amazing collection of again unbelievably engaged thoughtful supportive energized people in the industry [Music]