Episode 205 | Alena Hall - Prepared Mind

Guest: Alena Hall @lenadroid Alena Hall talks with Dave Rael about achievement, science, functional programming languages, preparation, and taking action Alena Hall is a professional in cloud, distributed systems, real-time data programming, big data analysis, functional programming, and machine learning with more than 10 years of experience. She is also known as an author of numerous presentations and talks. Alena teaches F# and speaks at international conferences, meetups and community events. Alena finished high school by the age of 15 and by the time she was 19 she has received Master's degree in Computer Science and Information Technology. Alena is an elected member of F# Software Foundation Board of Trustees. Currently she is working at Microsoft Research on the Project Springfield team, developing a cloud service for finding availability and security critical mistakes in software.You can find her on twitter as @lenadroid. Chapters: 2:26 - Dave introduces the show and Alena Hall6:29 - Growing up in Belarus7:40 - Lena's focus on software, the sciences, work, achievement, and motivation from a very young age11:35 - Alena's attitude on taking action15:01 - Alena's personal side16:24 - Project Springfield and what Alena and the team are trying to do with the project17:30 - Alena's ideas about dream projects - geeking out on the physical world and ways to completely reinvent manufacturing24:19 - The things that "light Lena up"26:48 - Immutability in distributed systems29:50 - Lena and functional programming31:54 - Alena's thoughts on failure and measurement of important metrics to identify problems36:13 - Alena's success story - quickly learning difficult things and achievement at a young age - the relative nature of success39:50 - How Lena stays current with what she needs to know40:46 - Alena's book recommendations41:30 - The things that cause Alena pain and suffering43:09 - Alena's top 3 tips for delivering more value44:18 - Keeping up with Lena Resources: Alena's Blog Get In Contact With Alena Lena on LinkedIn Projefct Springfield You and Your Research - Dr. Richard Hamming Dr. Richard Hamming Reid Evans on Developer On Fire A talk from Lena: Distributed .NET microservices architecture with Kubernetes in the cloud A talk from Lena: Cassandra, Docker and F# Awesomeness A talk from Lena: Machine learning with F# and Accord.NET A talk from Lena: F# and MBrace with Lena Dzenisenka A talk from Lena: Embracing Clouds - Alena Dzenisenka Blockchain Paxos Raft Everything You Know About Latency Is Wrong - Tyler Treat Fallacies of distributed computing Phil Haack on Developer On Fire Scott Hanselman on Developer On Fire “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” -Jim Rohn Hofstadter's law Alena's Upcoming (May 2017) Talk at OSCon Connect with Lena at OSCon: Save 20% with code PCDF Alena's book recommendation: A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking Alena's top 3 tips for delivering more value: Work on things that interest and excite you Learn and keep learning and don't procrastinate on self-education Be happy in your life outside work and work will be easier