Scale By The Bay 2018: Russell Spitzer Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Russell Spitzer Interview
so I'm Russell Spitzer I'm the software engineer at data stacks and I currently live in New Orleans so one of the main things I work on right now is the integration between Cassandra and spark so I write the spark Cassandra connector which is a pretty widely used tool for connecting the two systems my favorite thing about it is some of the new work that we're doing with the catalyst optimization engine inside of spark SQL it's actually what I came here to talk about and I get really excited about being able to do these things that we used to have to have a user manually implement automatically so looking at certain types of function calls and joins and having that happen without user intervention is really exciting to me I think my favorite has been the programming functional pipeline it's been really exciting to see all the new kind of things that people are working on new libraries and new ideas that are you know finally getting more attention and becoming more common so you know I I always my favorite thing about scale by the days I come here and I get to learn about a whole lot of new things that I didn't even have the imagination to think could exist before I think one of the key things that I'm going to bring back is probably the focus on trying to get things easy for end-users to work with one of the big problems I think with a lot of library usage is that we think about it as a developers and we don't think about it as much as how the users are gonna mean actually interfacing with it and it's really interesting to go through talks and see the steps which people go to to make it really easy to get started with their tools or their library so I always try to think about that I think what I'm interested in learning the most about right now is kind of the way forward in Scala because Scala has obviously been changing a lot recently and there's a lot of things happening in the community and I really need to get a better handle on whether or not everyone is moving forward or is sticking with the same kind of versions that I so currently I work with SPARC a lot so the versions that SPARC defaults to tend to be really common in my customer use cases so I want to see if everyone else is seeing the same sort of thing or whether or not people are trying to go to the most recent versions so I think Scala has been a really strong force and in my life in my development as professional it definitely took me out of a way of thinking about programming and in someone that's much safer and much more stable I know when I write certain types of things how they won't have errors in certain ways whenever I see people writing code now with mutable state and and nulls and things flying all about I start getting weird feelings because I know there will be bugs there there might not be bugs there today but there probably will be bugs there in the future and you just never know and moving to Scala has shown me that there's just another approach this functional approach this way where you you have more complete control over the things that are happening in the possible states that your code can enter into and that is really exciting for me one of the things I do is I here with some folks teaching them JavaScript and I'm always excited when they get to make that move from writing you know this code with a lot of indexing and for loops and and keeping state in their loop to the functional variations going to maps and filters and reduces and I it's just really great to see that becoming more part of mainstream coding as well my favorite thing is like I said a little earlier that I'm really excited about how all the new technology that's talked about here I mean this is really a conference where new ideas are the the star you know it's not so much about what what have you done at your company to increase business revenue it's more about what are the ideas that you've been working on and thinking about so I'm very excited about that kind of stuff obviously I like to see a Lexus a and all of my other my buddies from the old smack stack do so [Music] you