This past summer, I had the privilege of mentoring 4 university students in a group project. Our mission: to build a distributed datastore over the 8 week summer semester. Starting with a simple CRUD web app, by the end of the summer, the students had built a complex, sophisticated distributed system, with leader election, resilience and health checks. We all - mentor and students - learned a lot of lessons along the way, and not just about distributed systems. This will be an engaging and broad presentation, touching both on the technical challenges of distributed systems, as well as the process of teaching and learning.
Yoel Spotts is a Principal Software Engineer at Elastic. Holding degrees in Computer Science and Talmudic Law, he has over 20 years of programming experience. A big fan of the JVM, Yoel has worked in Java, Groovy and Scala. No stranger to DevNexus or public speaking, Yoel attended the very first DevNexus (back before it was called DevNexus) and has presented several times in the past. When not building great software or trying to avoid learning JavaScript, Yoel enjoys hiking and spending time with his family.
