Scale By The Bay Conference – A Universe Of Technology
The Scale By The Bay conference is deeply attached to the idea to bring together the global leaders in data, operations, Machine Learning, and the art and craft of software engineering. The conference has been organized for nine years. Since then, the group of speakers has grown and for now, there are one thousand speakers involved.
Since 2020 SBTB has been produced and supported by Konfy, which is a technology company guided by women. Konfy creates many events for developers including Scala Love, Haskell love, JLove and Data Love.
What is the Scale by the bay about?
The main goals of Scale By The Bay is:
- Making functional programming more simple and effective,
- Gathering many participants from Scala community,
- Explaining full-stack reactive systems
- Presenting cloud-native applications and end-to-end data pipelines.
In the speakers’ team
The main speaker of SBTB is dr. Alyona Medelyan, Ph.D. the Ceo of Thematic.
Thematic deals with artificial intelligence to analyze a large amount of information about products and services on many levels. Dr Alyona Medelyan has a PhD in language processing. She’s currently working with companies such as LinkedIn, DoorDash and ManpowerGroup.
In the team of speakers, we can find people with various experiences with technology topics. From software engineers, data & science machine learning engineering, Google’s brain research scientist, NVIDIA professors, directors of Al, product marketing managers, Microsoft product managers, to architects. The complete list of speakers is available here: https://www.scale.bythebay.io/speakers-1
Sponsors’ community
We can find Netflix, Scala, Signify Technology, Fauna, TrueAccord, LightBend, Databricks Manning, and many others in the list of sponsors and media partners.
Scale By the Bay not only builds its community by organizing conferences, it is also active in social media. SBTB is available on Twitter and Facebook, which yield more and more fans and people interested in participating. It is a smart move considering the number of people currently using social media, especially when it comes to young people.
Scalac, a Software development company, also sponsors and supports the Scale By The Bay and Scala’s community. Scalac operates in the areas of software development services (Big data, Backend development in Scala, Java, Web applications, Frontend development) and business services (consulting, workshops, training.
What do we know about their contents?
The topics of SBTB meetings can be divided into four main areas, with sub-topics:
- Software Engineering, which includes Knowledge of SF Scala, Scala Bay, SFQL Chart and BA Haskell.
- Architecture that deals with reactive systems, BA Kafka and Salt Stock.
- Big Data – which includes pieces of information about SF Spark, SF Hadoop and SF Big Analytics.
- Machine learning, involving Advanced Spark + TF, SF BA Ml and Bay Area AI.
A Teaser for Scale By The Bay 2021
At the conference planned for October 28th-29th of 2021, Alyona Medelyan on her talk wants to touch on topics such as:
How to reconcile different time zones so that they do not harm products and customers? How to create your team, product, acquire customers? And share her story – how she became CEO after starting as a researcher. Alyona Medelyan’s quick summary of her conference is at the link below.
What have we learned from previous conferences?
Each edition and each conference deals with a different topic. So, coming back to the meetings in 2020 and 2019, let’s see how the conference was back then. What topic did it tuckle?
#1 Acting Lessons for Scala Engineers with Akka and ZIO
Salar Rahmanian, Software Engineer, raised acting lessons for Scala Engineers using Akka and ZIO. Salar Rahmanian has over 20 years of commercial experience in software development, and he has been interested in it since the age of eleven. At the event, he presented how actors become the basis of modern concurrent and distributed systems, which benefits programming languages like Erlang and Scala. He reveals a model that prevents problems like deadlock, thread management and many others during software development. Salar Rahmanian introduces the theme of Akka, Zio-actors and actors. Then, he shows how ZIO – one of the modern functional effect systems increases type safety, enables coordination of changes in actor states, and answers how to maintain the profits that programmers obtained thanks to the actor paradigm.
Link to the video and graphics:
#2 A Reinforcement Learning Framework in Scala 3
Another topic presented at the SBTB conference in 2020 was a reinforcement learning framework in Scala 3 by Robert J. Neal.
He is a Software Engineer who focuses his career on experimentation systems and decision science. Robert Neal’s style of software is functional. During the lecture, he emphasises the word science and empowerment. He illustrates how the new version of Scala 3 makes it easier to use the library and how to use it to bring the most benefits. He also describes the Scala 3 functions:
- Compilation speed
- Opaque types
- Union types
- Trait Parameters
- Parameter Untupling
- Top-Level Definitions
#3 Re-programming the programmer, from Actors to FP
Paul Cleary at the Scale by the bay conference in 2019 deals with the phenomenon of the DNS management system, which at the very beginning was an Event Sourcing application created in Akka. However, as a result of many problems and incompatibilities, it required many transformations and changes. They mainly resulted from the constant innovations in the requirements, operational issues or simply errors. Paul Cleary introduces various architectural styles such as Event Sourcing in Akka and FS2. It tells about the concept of the DNS domain and lists the individual essential undertakings that must take place to develop the project. Finally, as in Jerem Smith and Jonathan Indig, it presents the beginnings of working on the project from scratch and the difficulties associated with it.
#4 A brief introduction to systems programming, with Scala Native
Another conference in 2019 was performed by Richard Whaling in which he addresses Scala Native’s new unsafe API. It turns out that Scala programmers already have access to the same possibilities as C programmers. Richard Whaling introduces the basic concepts of systems programming, pointers, strings, structures and arrays. It also provides information on how Scala will provide safer solutions than C programmers. We also learn how Scala can influence the architecture of the future.
Benefits from choosing Scale By The Day
Scale by the bay is a conference dealing with multiple issues related to technology. We find here topics related to the software language, functional programming, reactive systems, microservices, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or native applications used in clouds. The conference is very flexible towards society. People developing towards technology easily find a place to share their ideas, which helps to continue developing our world and the technology used in it. Its main goal is to share insights that can facilitate and speed up work. Actions that are taken aim to improve the quality of the currently introduced tools.
Who organizes Scale By The bay?
The Scale By The Bay organizers include people from many different sides of the technology department.
On their list, we can find names such as:
- Alexy Khrabov – a founder and meeting organizer: SF Scala, SF Spark and Friends, SF Hadoop, Bay Area AI, SF GraphQL
- Sara Asher – a Senior Director, Einstein Platform at Salesforce
- Anya Bida – a Lead Member of Technical Staff for Einstein Infrastructure at Salesforce.
- Tj Bay – a Senior Data Scientist at Ask Media Group.
- DB Tsai – an Apache Spark committer and PMC member.
- Mark Gover – a committer on Apache Bigtop, a committer and PMC member on Apache Spot.
- Chester Chen – a Senior Manager at GoPro Data Science Engineering.
- David Andrzejewski – a senior engineering manager at Sumo Logic.
- Chris Fregly – a Founder and Research Engineer at PipelineIO, a Streaming Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Startup.
The next conference is scheduled for October 28th-29th in 2021 online.
See also
Authors
Marketing Hero at Scalac. I strongly believe in creating opportunities rather than waiting for them to come. As befits Scalac team member I'm a hard worker, I always try to do the right thing and have a lot of fun! I'm an awesome friend and content writer, in that order. When I'm out of the office, I love to cook delicious Italian food and play board games with my friends. #boardgamegeek
