A mathematician friend of mine tweeted that anyone who doesn't understand abelian groups shouldn't build analytics systems. I'd turn that around and say that anyone who builds analytics systems ends up understanding abelian groups, whether they know it or not. I'll talk about how the laws of group theory provide a useful codification of the practical lessons of building efficient distributed and realtime aggregation systems, and give some examples of how that maps to useful code.
Avi Bryant Stripe @avibryant
Avi has led product, engineering, and data science teams at Etsy, Twitter and Dabble DB (which he co-founded and Twitter acquired). He's known for his open source work on projects such as Seaside, Scalding, and Algebird. Avi currently works at Stripe.