scale.bythebay.io: Adam Pingel Interview
Recording: scale.bythebay.io: Adam Pingel Interview
my name is Adam Pingle I worked for LexisNexis where I'm a senior director of software engineering I think for us we're building end-to-end products all the way from data science through to front-end application and visualizations and so I think the hardest challenge is being able to integrate all of those layers very quickly I'd say for us it's the the amount of data and the complexity of the data we're not necessarily the high traffic volume kind of site but the the complexity of the data is is really that the biggest scaling issue and so doing fast analytics on the the kinds of entities that we're extracting from our corpus of case law we need to get those down you know well under sub ii and those can be pretty substantial queries that would involve in some cases hundreds of thousands of documents I think well now now that we're a part of LexisNexis I came in through an acquisition five months ago was formerly with Ravel law we're encountering a lot more kinds of data previously we were confined to case law but of course LexisNexis has just orders of magnitude more data than we previously did so I think it's getting a handle on that prioritizing it and figuring out what are the highest value bits of NLP or Sheen learning that we can do to build products and get them in front of customers I think in many ways I think the its principled in a way that a lot of other engineering languages if you will are not so design patterns for instance I I'd rather use patterns from abstract algebra or category theory any day over over the use typical Gang of Four design patterns I also think it's it attracts a pretty interesting set of Engineers I think the culture that goes with functional programming is really powerful and I think I believe that that it does lead to higher quality software that it leads to fewer bugs that it's easier to reason about the software so I would say in many ways function program has paid off for us [Music] seeing everybody really we've got people coming over from from Europe and all over the the US and South America so it's just great to see people in person that you interact with on github or Twitter from time to time [Music]