Note: This is the transcript from the “Core.async a Clojure Library for Asynchronous Programming” presentation by from The New York Times. The video of his presentation can be found here: https://g33ktalk.com/core-async-a-clojure-library/

David Nolen: My name is David Nolen. I’m going to talk a bit about ClojureScript in core.async. How many people here have ever read about Core’s communicating sequential processes? Cool. That’s good. Has anybody ever tried using Golang, Rob Pike’s Golang? Only one, okay. Has anybody used a language that actually implements CSP? I mean, Go is one. So not that many. So this is something I think is really funny that something that nearly everybody has heard of, but nobody has tried. There’s been languages in the past. You had Occam-pi for the transputer, you had Concurrent ML, which was a variant of Standard ML that supported CSP. Then Go is actually really making waves. People really like it. I don’t really like it, but I think the CSP aspect of it is actually pretty cool. It very much holds very closely to Tony Hoare’s ideas.

So, Rich Hickey decided more or less to just copy Go’s interpretation of Tony Hoare’s original ideas, so I’m not going to assume that you know too much about CSP, and so we’ll go slow, but we’ll end up going fast later, so it won’t be boring if you think you know this stuff.

More…

 

Announcer: Okay, so our next speaker is Pete Soderling. He is the founder of G33kTalk, which is—I don’t know, I guess, I think it’s going to be like a multimedia empire in a little bit, but he has a really good mailing list that sends out some really interesting articles, mostly technology  articles, a little bit on technical leadership, as well. I’m not sure how he does it, like he operates both in New York and San Francisco. He actually records meetups, and so he puts some of the videos up on his website, as well. And so, he’s certainly somebody that’s very much embedded in the community. He gave the—well, a longer version of this talk at QCon, because recruiting is also something that he is good at in addition to multimedia and stuff. So, without further ado.

Pete Soderling: Thank you. Hey, guys. You’ve been sitting here for a while, so I’ll try to keep it to the point. I want to introduce you to the concept of Engineering PR. First of all, who am I, and why the hell am I up here? I’m an engineer from the first bubble, a hacker before that. I turned programmer in the mid-90s, and I ended up turned entrepreneur in 2003, so I’ve seen and hired lots of engineers over the last fifteen years, and now, I do consulting with top startups in New York and the Bay Area, and the CTO’s directing, helping them figure out how to build the best engineering teams. I’m also the founder of G33ktalk, as John mentioned, Keith mentioned, and now, I’ll tell you more about that, as well.

So why should you care about hiring? If you’re an engineer who’s already in leadership, you know exactly why because it’s important to build the best team. If you’re an engineer who wants to get into leadership, this is the single most important thing that you can learn that you might not already know. I do a lot of career coaching with engineers, and, being originally a self-taught engineer myself, it’s become apparent to me that some of the softer aspects of leadership management, hiring, recruiting, retention, team building—these things are crucial, and it’s especially hard in the current market because the market dynamics are quite lopsided.

More…

 

(Original post with video of talk here)

Adam Illardi: Hi, I’m Adam Ilardi.  I work here at eBay.  I’m an applied researcher.  Why do I choose eBay?  It’s a pretty cool company.  They sell the craziest stuff you’ll ever believe.  There’s denim jean jackets with Nick Cage on the back, and this kind of stuff is all over the place.  So it’s definitely cool.

The New York office is brand new.  It’s less than a year.  What does the New York office do?  Well, we own the homepage of eBay, so the brand-new feed is developed right over there.  You might even see one of the guys.  He’s hiding.  Okay.  And also, all the merchandising for eBay is going to be run out of the New York office.  So that’s billions of dollars worth of eBay business run right out of here.  It’s a major investment eBay has made in New York, which is really cool.

So why you’re here is to find out how we use Scala and Hadoop, and given all the data we have, the two pair very nicely together, as you will see.  All right, so let’s get started.  Okay, these are some things we’ll cover—polymorphic function values, higher kinded types, Cokleislis Star Operator, some use of macros.

Continue reading »

 

(Original post with video of talk here)

Abe Stanway: Okay. Hi, I’m Abe. I’m a data engineer at Etsy and today we’re going to talk about Skyline, of which I was the primary author. And so we’re going to talk about how we monitor, why we decided to build this, and how it advances the art of monitoring. So let’s start.

So Etsy is the world’s handmade vintage marketplace. We are based right here in Dumbo, so this wasn’t too much of a pain to get up here. We have a large stack. We’ve got a lot of stuff going on. Specifically, or actually not specifically at all, these are just some of our numbers of some of the servers that we’re dealing with – 41 shards, MySQL, 24 API servers, 72 web servers, 42 Gearman boxes, a 150 node Hadoop cluster, 15 memcached boxes, and around 60 search machines, and a lot more than that. Probably on a scale of a hundred to two hundred, for sure other various services come with a lot of things that we have.

And that’s not to mention the app itself, which is running on top of all these machines, and all the services that are actually running on these machines. In addition to that, we practice something called continuous deployment, which is kind of the new hotness we’ve developed with Devoxx, right. It’s kind of always deploying every single day, so we deploy around thirty to sixty times a day, every day, and we make this really really easy to do for all our engineers.

Continue reading »

 

(Original post with audio and slides is here.)

­­Hey there. You’re listening to G33k Talk. Got a very exciting piece for you today. Drew Linzer from the Votamatic Project is going to talk to us about the dynamic Bayesian forecasting model he used to call the outcome of all fifty states as early as June. Check it out.

Drew Linzer: I’m Drew Linzer and I had a little fun last Fall with the presidential election. Actually very happy with Barack Obama for winning the election. I said he was going to. So I don’t know — if you’re anything like me, every four years, I get very carried away with the presidential election coverage. It’s high entertainment for me.

And in one of the more promising I’ve seen, and I’m sure you saw too over the last few presidential campaigns is that news reporters, and pundits have started to use more quantitative information. Primarily, that means polls. But at the same time, if you’re anything like me, I’ve felt a lot of frustration with how these polls are being used, misused, misunderstood, misinterpreted. And I thought that something better could be done.
Continue reading »

 

(Original post with audio and slides is here)

Josh Wills:  All right.  My name is Josh Wills.  I am the Director of Data Science at Cloudera.  I’ve been at Cloudera for, how long has it been now, actually?  I’m a data scientist.  I should know this.  I think it’s been like 16 months or so, roughly speaking.  That sounds good, 16 months.  Before that I was at Google.  I worked at Google for a little less than four years.  I did kind of like a proper tour of duty at Google.  My first job at Google was working on the ad auction.  So you do a search on Google and the ads show up.  That was me.  You’re welcome.  Thank you all who have heard that joke before for laughing politely.  I appreciate that.

After that, I worked on a bunch of data infrastructure stuff.  So I worked on things like logging, building dashboards, building experiment frameworks, doing friend recommendations, all this kind of stuff, all trying to analyze user behavior.  A lot of it got used in Google+.  A lot of it got used in Google News.  A lot of it got used in Google Mobile Search.  So I’ve done pretty much everything with respect to data that you possibly can do in about a four year span, roughly speaking.

Continue reading »

 

(Original post with audio and slides is here )

Blake Shaw:  Thank you all for coming. As was mentioned, my name is Blake, and today I’m going to be talking about machine learning with large networks of people and places. So, here at Foursquare, we think there’s a great opportunity to leverage massive amounts of location data to help people better understand and connect with places all over the world. Continue reading »

 

(Original post with audio and slides is here)

Want to hear from more top engineers?
Our weekly email contains the best software development content and interviews with top CTOs. Enter your email address now to stay in the loop.

Greg Brockman:  So, I’m Greg Brockman. I work at Stripe.  So, Stripe is an online payment processor to make it really easy to add payments to your website.  So, if you haven’t heard of us before, you should definitely go check us out and use us for your data processing needs.

So, the thing I’m going to be talking about today is Monster, which is our event processing system that we’ve been using for a little over a year now.  So, I wrote the first generation Monster, and over time, a lot of different people at Stripe have contributed to it.  And the reason that I’m here is that we use MongoDB pretty heavily in order to make Monster work.  There are a lot of reasons that we chose MongoDB and stuck with MongoDB over the past year, and I’ll get into that.

Continue reading »

 

Full audio & slides for this talk posted here.

Doug:  Greetings programmers.  Welcome to Tech Exploration.  I’m Doug Crockford.  In a moment I’m going to introduce my friend Steve Souders.  Steve began looking at problems of performance of websites while he was at Yahoo.  A lot of people had looked at that problem before and would usually do things like fiddle with a database or fiddle with the servers and try to figure out why they weren’t going faster.  Steve looked at the whole web as a system.  Everything from the server end to the browser and discovered that the browser doesn’t work anywhere near as well as we thought it would or should and found lots of work-arounds for that, which substantially speeded up webs.  He wrote a number of articles about that and then published a couple of best-selling books on High Performance Websites and Even Faster Amazon or Even Faster Websites.  They have earned the rank of 48,000 and 66,000 in Amazon, which is pretty great.  So here he is, the fastest man in the world, Steve Souders.

Continue reading »

 

PETE: Hey, it’s Pete. I’m here in Silicon Valley today and I’m talking to Vida Ha, who’s the co-founder of Ifeelgoods. Hey, Vida.

VIDA: Hi

PETE: How are you doing today?

VIDA: Great.

PETE: Are you excited?

VIDA: Yes

PETE: You pumped?

VIDA: Yes

PETE: Good. So in this episode of g33ktalk, we’re going to talk to Vita about her technology stack and we have some really interesting things we’re going to talk about. Some infrastructure stuff, we’re going to talk about how to stop and prevent online fraud, which is pretty cool. We’re going to talk about some various data related stuff that you guys are dabbling in and using, which is cool. And yeah, we’re just going to generally geek out and have a good time. Are you ready?

VIDA: Sounds great

Continue reading »

Proudly hosted by WPEngine