Quote:
“In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are different.”
Favorite Moment(s):
When I told my friends I was joining Yahoo!, they all started yodeling :)
What have you done to be a better Yahoo?
Our team pioneered a new high-level language called
Pig Latin for analyzing web-scale data sets, which is now used thousands of times per day at Yahoo!. Pig Latin is making it easier for our scientists and engineers to do their jobs: understand the web and make it better.
Are you able to think big at Yahoo? How?
Absolutely. That’s my job. For example, my team developed a new way to characterize content evolution on the web, which led to a new crawling technique that cuts page downloads in half while achieving the same degree of freshness in the search engine.
What specific Yahoo! project has made the biggest impact on you and why?
I learned to appreciate simplicity (of systems, algorithms, code) while working with web-scale data management systems (e.g., the
Pig project) at Yahoo!.
What made you choose Yahoo! as a place to work?
It was a no-brainer to come here, and it’s a no-brainer to stay. I have access to an infinite number of interesting problems, work on whatever I want, and get to impact real products and publish freely. It’s a dream job for a researcher — seriously.
