Leif Wickland Interview
summary
Performance is the limiter: Python prototypes are orders of magnitude too slow for real-time ad tech, so the stack relies on Scala and a Spark shell pointed at a big data lake to distribute ad hoc searches and debug production issues. Data volume keeps doubling every few months, forcing constant cost reduction for processing. Strongly typed functional programming reduces regressions and on-call paging, and practical tools mentioned include a Vegas plotting library and an ML library that immediately solve recent analysis gaps.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:18Engineering issues
- 1:07Ad hoc analysis
- 1:48Current issue
- 2:26Functional programming
- 3:03Outro








