We had the chance to meet Iratxo and Iniyan, who won tickets to Scale By the Bay through our competition in October. We always endeavour to support the Scala community in any way possible and being able to give two people the opportunity to attend Scale By the Bay, who may not have been able to otherwise, felt really good. We recently caught up with the winners and here is competition winner Iniyan’s write up of his experience at Scale By the Bay…
First of all, thank you to Signify Technology for sponsoring myself and Iratxo to attend Scale By the Bay. There are three parts to the Scale By the Bay conference. Data, Reactive and Functional. I have been working in Scala for a year and was naturally drawn to the functional programming concept. I also have a data background since I have previously worked with big data technologies like spark, kafka and storm.
I attended "Turning a relational RDBMS into a spark data source" which explained in great detail about an Oracle library where we can make RDBMS as a data source for spark, which I found really interesting. This session described how to allow parallel and direct access to RDBMS tables from Spark, generate partitions of Spark JDBCRDDs based on the split pattern and rewrites Spark SQL queries into the RDBMS SQL dialect.
One of my other favourite sessions, was a Spark data session, “Building a High-Performance Database with Scala, Akka and Spark”. The speaker shared years of experience building high performance data systems using Scala, Akka, and Spark, plus recent experience building FiloDB, a high performance analytics database built on these technologies. This was very informative and I learned a lot about Akka and Spark.
Mesosphere explained how we can convert bare machines, amazon ec2 or google cloud computing into useful resources through their UI. With mesosphere we can install cassandra, habse, hdfs.. etc with simple clicks and it is very easy to manage and scale multi cluster machines. They were also giving away free sample books, Application Delivery with DC/OS and Designing data intensive applications. Since Scale By the Bay, I have read both the books and found them brilliant.
“Index your state for safer functional APIS” I learned the meaning of Index states in scalaz. There was also a session "stream all the things" where the speaker explained about the need of Kafka, Spark and Flink. Continuous delivery for AI applications with ECS session where an amazon engineer explained how to develop a sample AI application with ECS and he demonstrated ECS, s3 and ECR for developing the same.
My colleague and I met with Ryan, Jack and Carl from Signify Technology and we had a good chat about the conference and took group pictures as well. Overall, I would say the conference was so informative and I had the chance to interact with lots of folks from various companies, whilst learning so much.
Once again, thanks Signify Technology for sponsoring our tickets and giving us this experience.
If you would like to read Iratxo's review of Scale By the Bay which includes different talks and sessions, you can view the post here.