scale.bythebay.io: Thomas Kim Interview
Recording: scale.bythebay.io: Thomas Kim Interview
my name is Thomas Kim I work at a company call it iterable and I'm a principal engineer there few things scaling scale data scaling scaling like batch processing are all big issues that come up and our work also general coding issues programming style correctness testing we actually have very particular issues around scale because we part of the pitch of our company is that we work primarily with large consumer companies and they typically have many millions of users and part of the premise of our product is that we help them manage millions of users reasonably well and so by design we want to be able to accommodate tens of millions of interactions and transactions between the users and there are marketing campaigns and and so we have very particular issues around scaling both data sets so queries are over that data set and transactions over that data set and scaling we're sorry queries over that day set analytics or that day set and scaling transactions so interactions that users have with the company outgoing marketing campaigns emails and pushes as well as event triggered flows between users for a particular going through a particular campaign yeah so again part of the picture of our company is that we work primarily with large consumer companies and so as we saw no new customers will constantly pushing the limit to that scale to be signed bigger and bigger customers and so today you know our you know the biggest marketing campaign maybe 30 million emails tomorrow could be 70 million emails it could be 100 million emails that need to be sent in one day also increasing transaction volumes so the number of interactions that we have with end-users can increase as more campaigns go out as users interact with those campaigns [Music] yeah personally for me I feel like functional programming was like a revelation because I've been programming for a long time since I was a kid basically and I didn't really learn functional programming in a deep way like I'd done Lisp somebody back in college but I didn't learn functional programming in a deep way basically until either Scala which is why I sort of fell in love language and learning partial programming deep way really opened my eyes to what programming what the activity of programming is really all about which is reasoning about things in a coherent way it's just that you can really understand the essence of of a particular body of code and so it really felt like just sort of clearing the clouds in terms of how one approaches programming and understands code definitely like all the interaction so you get to have with all the people all the attendees other companies speakers users of Scala you know people working with data day of processing machine learning people employing all these tools like it for various real world ends and and practical uses and so it's it's it's fun to hear about all the different challenges and approaches that people have taken