SF Scala Finagle Interviews at Twitter
Recording: SF Scala Finagle Interviews at Twitter
hi everybody i'm alexi kravrov the organizer of sf scala and here we are on location at twitter where today we have a meet up on fenetra and finch and here with us we have travis vladimir and steve who will present and they will tell us a little bit about themselves and what they do at twitter we'll start with travis okay i'm travis brown i work on the open source team here at twitter and i really shouldn't be the one starting because this is about um so they're giving the main talks about finch and finatra and i'm just talking about a couple of experimental um integrations that we're thinking about doing in future versions of finch um so my job on the open source team is an uh i work as an open source advocate for projects like um like uh finagle specifically and twitter util and um i also do some other work with other projects like finatra sometimes um anything else what else hi i'm vladimir i'm on csl team here tour working on finagle full time and today i'm going to talk about the finch library which is kind of like outside project and it's just like make your life easier with finagle http and yeah that's probably all you'll see you'll you'll know everything from my talk hi my name is steve kusenza i lead the finatura and data ipi teams uh here at twitter um i became uh really interested in contributing finatura because i've always been passionate about writing like modular testable services and financial lets you do that on top of twitter's stack and uh tonight i'm gonna be presenting some of the new features available the new version two of finature thanks guys so i hear that some of these aside projects and some folks at twitter are saying they're using open source uh is this what you do for actual main function and if not how does open source and your job function work together and maybe you can like elaborate a little bit about overall twitter culture on this topic great question uh my normal day job is leading the data api team at twitter where we create apis to expose twitter data to business partners but finatura is a project i'm really passionate about i lead the development efforts and we also have some people that work full-time on it i work full-time on finagle and doing sometimes finch uh like during the day or probably on the weekend usually happens in my spare time and yeah there is not too much to do and usually just enough to like spend a couple of hours per day maybe yeah but most of the time at work i'm working on finagle so because i'm on the open source team it is the majority of my job is working on the open source side of these projects and um because there are so there are some some things that we do so we use different build systems internally and externally so when we um open source a project often there will be specific work that needs to be done because the build systems that we've been using internally don't work for the outside world and so um i guess that that's been my the the main role that i've played in finato so far is taking our internal and our internal build configuration for finatra and making sure that we can convert it over to sbt which is the open source build tool that we're using and with finch i've been um because it so finch vladimir can tell will tell us a little more about this but it originally started as an open source project outside of twitter and it's still it's still its primary home unlike some of our open source projects is on github not in an internal monorepo and so it's it's got the nice feature that it's been open source from the beginning great so uh i think uh we have actually very interesting set of financial technologies here and i think it's good to mention that we're planning to do a finagle uh part of scholar by the way conference in august and uh uh traditionally like the non-twitter stack is you know akka kafka uh spark and things like that and twitter has finagle and something bird and we really want to raise the profile of these technologies in the community i think a lot of them are used uh inside twitter uh we see a lot of more visibility happening so maybe uh you can kind of tell us briefly enough to folks who want to come to this conference in august and learn more about finagle uh you know what are the best things about finagle you guys are working with how this components interoperate and maybe travis like how do you see that spreading in the community yeah so we have many production twitter http services that run on finatra and we're really excited to be able to get this new version 2 out in the community get some feedback and also be able to see kind of what new features people are able to contribute back as well yeah i actually the funny thing that i actually submitted a talk to scala by the bay about finch so if you somehow accept it i'm going to talk about about finch match much more yeah right and so um i believe we will have if an angle section there so travis maybe you'll give some more details about it yes so we're still working out the details of what the finagle conference in august will look like but we're hoping to have a call for papers up in at least the next couple of weeks probably in a more complete schedule and plan for what that day will look like so um yeah it's something that we're really excited about that it's something that we're going to be able to bring together a lot of people who are current finagle adopters or potential financial adopters and or people who are just curious like we want to learn more about how we can use finagle and for our own applications so uh so you guys work in different groups and tutors very large like so i wonder how do you like what is the software discovery like like how do you find you know that what you want to to write it was not already written on twitter or if it was uh how do you go about using it and let's say you know you want some piece of it to like refract like is there anything like a central repository or you know where are the reusable components where do they live how do you go about essentially refactoring twitter code base and cooperating around it so i don't know if i'm the person to answer since i don't primarily unlike these other two work in the twitter and twitter's um internal monorepo primarily uh so i i guess that um let's see how did we learn about each other's projects that would be a good place to start so so yeah right i've learned about finatra uh some time ago before i joined tour so i kind of no already know that there is such thing and i believe we have a wiki page some kind of a tetrader internally that says what you can use and what you can't use inside the tier and that's basically how we do it yeah we have uh all of our source code primarily lives in one large monorepo we have code search tools that allow you to find different pieces of software we have different or we have a standard way of documenting the software who the service owners are and a lot of it is also just kind of face to face most of the software engineers are at san francisco's office and uh yeah cool and i'll wrap up with this question to each of you uh what makes it the most fun working on twitter what is your favorite kind of part of software engineering job at twitter what you like what what part of the day you enjoy the most what kind of software engineering work is your favorite pastime i love uh the scale of engineering problems at twitter and i also love the diverse challenges that we face so that's been really exciting to be a part of and uh i'm really passionate about writing kind of modular testable um code so i've been able to do financial is one way of doing that on the twitter stack that we've found a lot of value from um yeah what about me i really enjoy working on finagle since we kind of in the like bottom of the stack everybody depends on us and you can easily broke everything in just one commit and it's always fun to like um you know to control the things and be able to fix everything and yeah it's it's fun so i'd been working with scala for a couple of years before i joined twitter last um last may and so i i really care a lot about the scala community and about a number of scholar open source projects so i think for me one of the most exciting parts about working at twitter is um being able to uh to see our open source products being adopted by the scala community and then also to to work on things like the things that i'm going to be talking about tonight where we are trying to integrate our open source software projects with other popular um open source software projects in the scala community i have to ask you travis you know you do so much great work and answers on stack overflow and you provide detailed deep answers and a lot of them thanks when do you find the time how many of you are there i i do a lot of it at night it's kind of it's just like a bad habit that i'll i'll happen to notice that there's a new stack overflow question on my phone and i'll have to like run to a computer and answer it because it's just this compulsion that i have um so yeah it's it's a lot of fitting things in little pieces that's very appreciated by the community you know it really is seen there it works you know it helps so thanks a lot thank you thank you guys we're looking forward to the meetup you