Scale By The Bay 2018: Wyatt Meldman-Floch Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Wyatt Meldman-Floch Interview
I'm Wyatt I live in San Francisco I work for consolation labs and I'm the CTO oh cool so we're building a new kind of Bitcoin I guess one could say we're we're you know kind of we liken ourselves to something called like a unn nonlinear consensus protocol so what we're trying to do is actually find a way to perform distributed consensus concurrently and what's really cool is that you know in order to actually achieve this we replaced you know the traditional like proof of work step that exists in a lot of different block chains as opposed to like a proof of stake with an actual game that optimizes the network's topology so notes constantly try to compete to become kind of like the best actor in the system and the result is that it will have some kind of semi-autonomous behavior programming software architectures and data pipeline so just programming in general I'll probably go to architecture just because it sounds a little bit more you know fun than the programming in general and I've written quite a few too many data pipelines to you know I want to do that on a Saturday I'm gonna share well I guess you know best practices are all kind of you know relative to what you're actually trying to do for us and what we're trying to build we really just want to make everything as functional as possible so yeah I guess one could just say general functional programming best principles [Music] honestly I'm really interested in just the functional programming kind of stuff that's going on so like I went to that Haskell talk yesterday and I thought Oscars Wiccans talked about you know coming up with a way to do like reasonable functional programming like you know don't be afraid to you know use a VAR in someplace if you need to to speed something up but you can still have really functional interfaces I thought that was a really cool talk and that's kind of stuff I'm interested in that's deep man well you know um I'll see on the whole like programming got easier for me when I learned about functional programming even just doing stuff in Python like with you know lambdas and you know some like list comprehensions and stuff things are just a lot easier to reason about and when I started doing are using like more comprehensive typed things like in Scala I was actually really able to kind of see the the connection to like higher order like just like higher mathematics and kind of what we're doing in programming that was kind of a huge aha moment for you know me and sort of understanding really like what's going on when we're building like distributed systems or processing data in general and honestly like just learning Scala in general although I don't asan too much of a fanboy but it kind of really kick-started I think my career because it just sort of opened up a whole set of skills and a toolset that made me a pretty effective programmer well I mean my team who's all here I just want to give a shout out to all the consolation guys and Tyler and rile thanks for coming to rally you know my being the team a had given a talk with me today you know I ran into one of my old folk heroes Oscar Boykin yesterday who you know his some of the stuff he's worked on we're using directly and I've been following that that worked like with algebra for a really long time so that was pretty cool and yeah I mean it just sort of it was kind of nice to to be a part of the whole ecosystem a little bit more I think I'm kind of younger than a lot of my you know colleagues and stuff so it's you know this is my first one and it's kind of a huge honor to be here really