scale.bythebay.io: Rob Norris Interview

Recording: scale.bythebay.io: Rob Norris Interview

all right my name is Rob Norris I work for the Gemini Observatory and I write software that helps astronomers use big telescopes the biggest engineering issue that we run into is technical debt and trying to maintain old systems and upgrade them and we've been moving from Java to Scala gradually over the last six years or so and it's working out well for us so we're using skeleton overcome some of those challenges we have we don't really have scaling problems because we have a small number of users we're mostly focused on correctness and stability oh we get great benefits from functional programming how we are able to reason about our code we're able to use composition to take small programs and combine them to make bigger programs without an increase in complexity that you would get without functional programming so we have a small team and a big codebase and it's a lifesaver it's it's what's allowing us to keep a hold of the complexity my favorite part is seeing friends that I've gotten to know online seeing people in person and seeing during their talks and hearing what they're working on is there's just a whole lot of interesting stuff going on