Although Backend Developer, Natan Silnitsky might be a first-time speaker, with over 12 years of software engineering experience behind him, we can't wait to hear his Scala Days talk this year!
And we are not alone as Scala Days caught up with Natan to ask him all about his highlights and challenges.
'With more than 12 years of software engineering behind him, Natan Silnitsky joined Wix.com over three years ago where he founded and then served as backend tech lead for Wix payments solutions services. He has most recently been a part of a task force that is responsible for building the next generation CI system at Wix on top of Google’s Bazel.
In his talk “Building Scala with Bazel” at Scala Days Lausanne, Natan will share how Wix embraced Bazel and dramatically improve the build times. In advance of the talk, we spoke to Natan about his team’s wins at Wix, the benefits and challenges of Scala and his upcoming talk.
What is your background and what does your current role involve?
For many years, I’ve been working on backend large scale web applications development, first with .Net and later with Scala. In the past few years I’ve moved to infrastructure development with build tools (building Scala with Bazel) and now I’m focused on bringing fast, scalable, feature-rich event-driven libraries above Kafka for Wix backend. Once we make the code available in open-source, I hope everyone will enjoy the results of our work.
What’s the biggest highlight of your career so far?
I’m very excited and honored to play a major role in the task force that cut Wix backend code build times by several orders of magnitude by developing Bazel migration tools, contributing to Scala build rules for Bazel and setting up a brand new system for our CI on top of Bazel.
Why did you choose Scala and what kind of problems does it solve for you?
Scala is the go-to language for writing statically typed, safe, scalable, concurrent and distributed code in a modular fashion. It’s also very elegant and concise. I love it!
What’s the most important challenge Scala developers are facing today?
One of the biggest challenges, in my opinion, is to get functional effects code writing practices standardized and organized in one place.
What’s one thing that could address this challenge?
Only time will tell if this challenge will be addressed. ZIO looks promising, and perhaps later versions of Scala will be able to successfully address it too.
Who should attend your talk at Scala Days and why?
Developers who work on large complex codebases can benefit a lot from learning about Bazel’s core features. They will be able to see fast builds in general and fast Scala builds specifically.
Whom would you like to connect with at the conference?
Can you share your favorite Scala Days story or memory with us?
As a first-time speaker, I’m looking forward to collecting great new memories and stories!
Don’t miss Natan Silnitsky and his talk “Building Scala with Bazel” at Scala Days Lausanne on June 12th.'
This interview was conducted by and originally posted by Scala Days.