SF Scala: Tim Kral Interview

[Music] hello everybody I'm Alexa crabber of the organizer of chef skull and the area meetups and today we're a location at medium I hope a lot of you guys know about medium it's a writing platform and they use Scala for various data tasks so we're very excited to be with Tim Krul here today thank you Tim for having us so tell us a little bit about what what you do it medium when what why is it important of a medium so what I do a medium yes so a medium we don't have a lot of titles and we don't put a lot of weight on titles but if you look at my LinkedIn profile you probably see that I am a tech lead and so I work on a couple of areas at the company specifically our big data and machine learning platforms and I work on a product surface of ours that we call curation tools and the idea there is to enable our curator our curation team which is about 10 people to categorize and annotate the content coming onto the platform through human intelligence so we do a mix of machine learning machine intelligence and human intelligence so I'm a medium user and I enjoy the platform right like it has a beautiful editor and it has you know stuff coming to me we should recommend can they're a little bit whole the circum Dacians happening sure so we have a couple of things that we do for recommendations we do recommendations through your network there's a networking element to medium we do recommendations through some topic analysis so one of the things that we'll do is as posts come on to the platform we have machines and humans try them right yes try to categorize the post into topics as you read posts on medium we develop what we call it topic graph for you and we use that as signal to make recommendations how do you know if I like the recommendations that's something that we're working on I'm also a good yeah so we we have some signals that we use implicit signals mostly one of the things that we're hoping to do in the coming quarter is make some of those reader signals more explicit mm-hmm and provide a tighter feedback loop to make our recommendations even better and really get solid feedback about what our readers think about the post that they're reading on medium mmm-hmm and we're you know using Scala so we're happy to learn you guys are using Scala how did you come to that decision how did this happen so if I have to be honest with you it was mostly a business decision I mean a medium has a brand but we're actually a pretty small company and so we have to rely on the resources that we have and it just so happens that we have in-house resources that know Scala and like Scala and so we lean on those people to make that decision and to leverage the knowledge that they already had coming into the company that's a very lucky set off Bradley well the comment isn't saying we cannot find Scala people we can fire skull people where do we find them all right so you guys were like does it have anything to do with the Twitter roots yes so we had a lot of X Twitter people and you are alluding to there that has a very big Scala culture there so yes that was a heavy influencer so I'm curious Twitter is a bubble to writing short texts yes right and medium is about writing a long text yes some curious how do how does the domain inspire you and other folks working here do you see that a lot of people write or are they interested in writing how does kind of you know writing overlap with coding that's a good question we do talk about writing a lot at medium both in making it easy for writers to express themselves and easy for readers to consume like we're talking about through the recommendation system and and even internally we talk a lot about writing we run our pre-release environment is totally based on medium and all of our tech specs are written on medium so we're constantly eating our own dog food and producing writing internally mm-hm and in fact just last week we had a Education Week what we call Education Week and one of the things that we did was go through a writing seminar for engineers mm-hmm so making them better writers and hopefully they'll produce interesting blog posts and and you know express themselves through writing so it's something that we talk about constantly at the company interesting you know on the other hand I notice that there is no like a lot of coding blogs on video I think people do it more now but it's medium Elysium medium for coding can you include text coding fragments do you have to go to github like gist's embed them how do people call it like how do you write technical documentation we do how do you glue text code fragments right so there is a feature where we can use we can you can include coding blocks but it's not the best for that we actually just had someone come through asking for latex supports so you know that's something that we're you know gonna have to put on the backlog right but there's some functionality available to do that but it's not always the best mm-hmm but you know it's something that I think is gonna be on the backlog so how did you get interested in in this space in a medium in a medium so truth be told I was working a small startup that was acquired by medium so that's how I came to be at medium there's an I stated medium is because we have a great culture we have a very flat organization I know I've been in meetings with F Williams who's you know the founder of Twitter know the guy you meet every day so that's always very excited to do some medium tonight exactly so that's always very exciting you know the some of the technology choices like the fact that they're on Scala mm-hmm is was very intriguing to me and you know I think there's a lot of room to to express yourself and grow in explore technology at this company which is very intriguing so curious about you know I think you know your role is very important in in the world of reading a medium right because eventually I think medium is succeeding in winning mine share of bloggers and and readers right because I think a lot of companies now have a medium book for instance when I think that when New York Times wrote an expose about Amazon they battled on medium because right so New York I think Amazon replied in the medium post and you know a New York Times editor I reply there so so a lot of companies now have a medium publication as kind of the official channel and I think people see that this network effect is a major advantage so they don't want to do a standalone blogs there they go to me so if that grows the discovery we shall working on will be very important yeah I mean we're working very hard to create what we call the quality pool which is you know we want to it's it's not just about writers expressing themselves it's about giving readers value - right so sort of two things that were concentrating very hard on is finding quality stuff even beyond just the network right like there'd be I know if you ask Ted Williams he would say one of the things we aspire to is finding that no-name author that doesn't have any network and raising him up on medium because he's producing really great stuff right yeah and then on the other side you want to give readers stuff that they're interested in reading and that informs them and entertains them so how much of that kind of mission weighs on you daily like how like you get up and say like do I have to disrupt the world of writing today what I'm gonna do today to do that I mean I'm just I'm just a humble engineer I just come to work and try to do the best I can write make systems right but eventually that will have an effect right that eventually will have an effect yeah some people will find some writing which will change the life so like I personally followed some really interesting you know things which medium recommended to me which I wouldn't have found otherwise it's already working so I'm really curious because like in the in the long run like people used to find books randomly and stumble on Russell with a very rudimentary way so you guys are really kind of trying to solve their heart problem so maybe we'll kind of wrap up with the forecast like what do you want to accomplish this year like we're doing it fail do you have for the community doing yourself from developers doing yourself from readers like what I'm aiming for and where do you think community can help this community scholar community specifically yeah that's a good question [Music] is there an open-source we can help you with I just talking with the guy outside and he asked me about open sourcing and I said well I broached the subject and waiting out a response okay no I think you know just interacting with the community is is great hosting this meetup it's gonna be fantastic I think is just sharing ideas well you know what we're doing and what's working for other people and you know it's sort of the common open-source argument which is if you if you add a little and you can consume from other people and together everyone makes everything better right so I don't know if there's anything specific that comes to the top of my mind but in terms of machine learning like what kind of problems do you want to solve this year what problems well we're concentrating on two things we're gonna do a facelift on our recommendation system like we were talking about before mm-hm and we are concentrating on what we call content annotation which is organizing and annotating content as it comes from a platform like like I said with both machine intelligence and human intelligence and sometimes it's machine intelligence and forming human intelligence for example we will rank posts that we want humans to review first rather than second or third or fourth so those are major projects that we have going on this year in fact this quarter interesting so it's kind of a major effort on human-in-the-loop totally okay this is exciting well thanks for sharing and we're looking forward to your to get my talk thank you very much thank you thanks the appreciate it [Music]