Chris Fregly By the Bay 2019

By Alexy Khrabrov

Chris Fregly at Scale By the Bay (Chris is the third person from the left)

Chris is a global legend. I first saw him talking about the Advanced Spark book he was writing when Apache Spark just appeared. Chris would draw those hugely entangled diagrams interconnecting everything, and you knew his mind is at work grokking all the OSS in the sea and making sense of it all.  He started presenting it at meetups, where we met.

Register at Scale By the Bay with the code FREGLY15 to get 15% off all passes, while the time and supplies last!

In 2015, I put together the very first SMACK training, materializing the term for the first time.  It was a joke on Twitter in the Typesafe circles, coined by Oliver White, the Chief Storyteller. SMACK stands for Spark/Mesos/Akka/Cassandra/Kafka and describes a data pipeline from soup to nuts — API (Akka), data bus (Kafka), persistence (Cassandra), and compute (Spark).  Nowadays Spark does ML/AI too, and the whole thing runs on infra as code, then Mesos, and now more often than not Kubernetes.

Our bespoke, all-day training is a hallmark of Scale By the Bay, the yearly conference of the best Bay Area meetups on software engineering and data. SMACK was a fantastic milestone. Each company was represented by its top talent. By the time we ran our first SMACK training, Chris was at Databricks, and as the Chief Scientist at Nitro and an early customer, I saw his name in the code for AWS.

Chris brought a lot of his open-source work, where he already started to assemble a world-encompassing system to become Pipeline.AI in the future. By the way, Chris asked me whether .ml or .ai is better for a domain, given my domain collecting hobby, and I pushed for .ai when it was not yet eclipsing ML as it does today!

Chris then grew his OSS into Pipeline.ai, and he also started the Advanced Spark meetup, which then added TensorFlow and went Global.  Chris eclipsed all other Spark meetups in size, including the very original one I started with Matei as an offshoot of Sf Scala in 2012.

Chris taught thousand of developers worldwide in his global tours, and online in his amazing workshops, now on Kubeflow. He set up everything in the cloud and added all the state of the art components, so his talk titles read like who’s who of the scalable OSS.  

Chris spoke at every Scale By the Bay, and here we have some of his talks.

2015: Big Data Scala

2015: Spark After Dark, Generating High-Quality Dating Recommendations

2016: Data By the Bay

2016: Real-time, Streaming Advanced Analytics and  Interview

2016: Scala By the Bay

One-Click Deploy Spark ML + TensorFlow AI Models and Interview

Modern Software Architectures and Data Pipelines Panel

2017: AI By the Bay

Deploying and Scaling Spark ML and Tensorflow AI Models and Interview

SF Spark and Friends

Let’s talk SMACK: Meet the SMACK Stack Experts Panel Discussion

2018 : Scale By the Bay

Continuous ML Applications in Production and Interview

We’re looking forward to hear from Chris again at the upcoming Scale By the Bay 2019!  Register with the code FREGLY15 to get 15% off every pass, including this year’s bespoke all-day training, Serverless with Google!

The whole Fregly By the Bay Playlist is on our functional.tv channel!

Do not miss Chris Fregly at Scale By the Bay 2019: book your ticket now!