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Peter Hastie

Long-time Bleacher Report survivor. Proud to have worked on many of the social features (authentication, graph search, direct messaging) that keeps our app improving

Peter is one of the longest standing members of the Bleacher Report engineering team having joined the company shortly after it was acquired in 2013. During that time he has had roles on the front-end, data engineering, and back-end teams. He currently leads the team of engineers responsible for the direct messaging feature in the B/R app.

Past Activities

Peter Hastie
Code BEAM SF
06 Mar 2020
12.15 - 12.40

Levelling up at Bleacher Report: A cautionary tale

Elixir helped Bleacher Report grow from a scrappy startup to a household name. We saw gains just by introducing this new tool but to go further we need to learn how to master it. For self-taught programmers like myself that has meant learning some basic computer science. I will show how I applied data structures to get more out of Elixir. I'll also talk about some of the traps we left for ourselves as we were learning - and the horror of my experience breaking an app used by 3.7 million people.

THIS TALK IN THREE WORDS

Linked-lists 

Trees

Disaster

OBJECTIVES

Peter will show how some basic algorithms usually taught in object-oriented languages can be applied in Elixir, with real-world examples of how doing so can improve application performance. He will also highlight some of the issues that people should be aware of when modifying complex production systems.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Anyone who enjoyed (or attended) an introduction to data structures course will be comfortable with the material here. The cautionary tales will be relevant to anyone who works on a web application that's too large to be understood by everyone on the team.