Allison McMillan Curry On 2017 Interview
Allison McMillan will be giving a talk at Curry On 2017. Her talk is called Angelina Ballerina Learns About Memory Allocation.
Follow Allison on her homepage, GitHub and Twitter.
PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Functional Programming?
Allison McMillan: As a career-switcher, I first learned Ruby and object oriented programming. It wasn't until after that I started to learn about functional programming. I got into functional programming mostly by attending the StrangeLoop conference in St. Louis for the past few years. It's a great conference that exposes participants to a number of interesting programming trends and languages. There, I learned about different functional programming languages. These days, I try to experiment with Elixir whenever I have time.
PF.tv: What is your talk about?
AM: Angelina Ballerina learns about memory allocation is about all the basic terms, concepts, and definitions you need to know in order to understand and dive into what is going on related to memory in your program. Additionally, I'll give you some tools to debug when you have a memory-related issue and extra resources because this is a hefty topic.
PF.tv: Who is your talk for?
AM: My talk is for anyone who is interested in knowing more about memory and what the memory in their program is doing, as well as anyone who wants to understand garbage collection and memory debugging a little better.
PF.tv: What do you hope people will take away from the talk?
AM: I hope people walk away from this talk with a better understanding of what goes on under the hood related to memory usage and memory allocation and feels confident to explore these items in their own application.
PF.tv: What concepts do you recommend people be familiar with to maximize their experience with the talk?
AM: Oh boy, talking about memory allocation there are so many terms and phrases. If people would like, they should read the most basic definition of what garbage collection is, but my hope is that this talk is in depth enough for more experienced folks, but approachable and comprehensible for beginners.
PF.tv: What resources are available for people who want to study up before the talk?
AM: There are a few great text books on this topic and excellent talks other folks like Michael Bernstein, Aaron Patterson, and Pat Shaughnessy have given.
PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?
AM: People can find me on twitter at @allie_p, on my blog, or on my company's blog.
PF.tv: Are there any projects you'd like people to be aware of? How can people help out?
AM: I am an active blogger who talks about tech as well as leadership and professional growth. You can check out my blog and sign up to get updates if these are skills you're looking to improve as well.
PF.tv: Where do you see the state of functional programming in 10 years?
AM: With Elixir and other more accessible functional languages exposing newer developers to the concepts and principles of functional programming, I think that in 10 years, the newer developers entering the field will be able to utilized object oriented programming ideas and principles jointly with functional programming ones to create interesting code patterns and solve software problems from a different point of view.
