Scale By The Bay 2019: Russell Spitzer Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2019: Russell Spitzer Interview
[Music] I'm Russell Spitzer I work at a company called data stacks and I'm a software engineer and the most of the time I work on something called a spark Sandra connector which is the integration between Apache spark and Apache Cassandra [Music] yeah this is I think my third or fourth scale by the bay I mean it was Scala by the bay a long time ago I first heard about it because I was going to a lot of the meetups that were being hosted by Alexa and we also then learned that we actually live pretty close together and I have you know just been attending meetups and going to scale by the bay ever since you know so I always think it's one of my favorite conferences to go to because a lot of people I know go to this conference and you really hear the the kind of cutting edge of what's happening in the industry my favorite part about my talk is it's it's really about weighing the costs and benefits of something before you fully dive into it and put all your you know your eggs in that basket so in particular my talks about whether or not SPARC is a good addition to your stack especially if Cassandra is already part of it and I like to talk about the the primary costs and benefits that you can get from including SPARC so one thing that people don't like to think about sometimes because it's fun to get the new toy and get it involved as quickly as you can is there might be alternative solutions to the same problems that are cheaper to maintain easier to build and easier to work with yeah so since I work on the integration between spark and Cassandra and we're really a business-to-business sort of organization what I do is basically try to broaden the market of people who can work with Cassandra because all by itself Cassandra is an amazing OLTP database distributed it's got a lot of fault tolerance and resilience but it doesn't have the analytics tools that a lot of people required to do other things with their data so I like being able to help broaden that that market allow people who never thought they could do a certain thing with their Cassandra data suddenly get open to a whole new world of all the possibilities that spark allows [Music] so one of the talks that I really enjoyed today's I learned a lot about Scala bridge there was a talk on how to enhance diversity and strengthen the Scala community and one thing that I always feel like I need to be doing better at is finding more folks who are just entering into programming and helping them get a better understanding of what the industry actually looks like and what it's like to be a programmer and building those initial skills and confidence so that they can hopefully someday be speaking at a conference just like this [Music] so professionally a thing I'm most excited about is this is a little technically deep and probably doesn't have a lot of relevance to a lot of people but spark is coming out with the new API called datastore data source v2 and data source v2 really enables end databases or systems connecting to spark a much greater range of capability these sorts of things that you can start doing while communicating with spark are being greatly expanded the interactions between catalogs and other databases and sparks on catalogue are becoming pluggable there are budget and there are a lot of differences in how spark recognizes the partitioning and clustering of external data sources as well as better integration for streaming and things like that so I'm really excited that that's about to become full mainstream and I'm excited to be working on our own connector that's going to utilize that new API I mean my favorite part about scale by the bay is really all of the super intelligent welcoming people who are here I mean when you when you're at this conference it always feels like you can ask a question of anybody and suddenly learn a whole lot of new things or if you're confused about something in the industry a new trend or something like that everyone is always ready to talk and explain why something is important now or why they don't think something is important so it's it's a great place to come and learn about things that aren't widely talked about so I really appreciate that about it and I do wish the conference was closer I live in New Orleans now so what I would like is should be hosted in New Orleans but outside of that I really enjoy coming to the conference [Music]