Fear of and uncertainty about open source
How does a small engineering team decide which technologies to use? Or whether to be open source or not? To be self-hosted or in the cloud? Wes Chow discusses the choices Chartbeat has made, how theyve succeeded and failed, and the framework by which the company makes decisions and argues for transparency and empathy from free and proprietary technologists to ease the pain.
| Talk Title | Fear of and uncertainty about open source |
| Speakers | Wes Chow (Cortico at MIT Media Lab) |
| Conference | O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference |
| Conf Tag | Engineering the Future of Software |
| Location | New York, New York |
| Date | April 3-5, 2017 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
How does a small engineering team decide which technologies to use? Do we run it ourselves, or do we buy it from AWS? Or do we buy from Google Cloud? If we run it ourselves, what do we use? How do we pick between the overabundance of Apache projects? Is Beam different than Flink? Accumulo or Cassandra? Hive or Drill? Java or Scala? Rust or Go? Theano or Torch? Emacs or XEmacs? Emacs or vi? What’s a poor decision maker to do? Wes Chow discusses the choices Chartbeat has made, the successes and (more importantly) the failures, and his role as CTO in making these choices. Chartbeat runs multiple databases in production (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Mongo, Riak, Memcache, Redshift, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, and WADE, as well as proprietary databases) with varying results, using multiple languages in the backend (Python, C/C++, Lua, and Clojure, with a dash of Java). Wes makes a plea for free and proprietary technologists to be more open and empathetic about their systems.
