Pony: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology

Video of my QCon New York talk: “Pony- How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology” is now available.

The talk details my experiences thus far in using Pony at Wallaroo Labs to build Wallaroo, a high-performance stream processing system. The talk was part of a FinTech track so there’s a slight Fintech bent to some of the content that probably wouldn’t have been in the talk otherwise.

There’s a couple of links at the end of the talk for the additional material you can check out. To make life easier on everyone I’m recreating it here.

Trash Day: Coordinating Garbage Collection in Distributed Systems

“Trash Day” is an awesome paper on how coordinating garbage collection pauses in Apache Spark, and Apache Cassandra clusters improved performance.

Ownership and Reference Counting based Garbage Collection in the Actor World

More commonly known as the “ORCA paper”. This article by Sylvan Clebsch et al. dives into the inner-workers of the Pony garbage collector.

If you are interested, I’ve made the slides available on Speakerdeck. Like most of my talks, the slides aren’t particularly good at standing on their own without the talk itself.