The power of good abstractions in systems design

Lorenzo Saino (Fastly)

10:00–10:15 Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Location: Hall A7/A8

Average rating:

(4.75, 4 ratings)

Download slides (PDF)

A large scale longitudinal study of hundreds of thousands of patents started by a Soviet engineer in the 1940s showed that problems and solutions are repeated across industries and disciplines, and that scientists and engineers frequently tend to solve problems by reinventing solutions already used successfully in other contexts.

This talk shows how good abstractions make it possible to identify and apply solutions to seemingly unrelated problems from different disciplines to build better systems with less effort.

Lorenzo Saino

Fastly

Lorenzo Saino is an engineering manager at Fastly, where he leads the team responsible for building the systems that control Fastly network infrastructure.

During his tenure at Fastly he built systems solving problems including fault tolerance, load balancing and network observability.

Prior to Fastly, he received a PhD from University College London. His thesis investigated design issues in networked caching systems and he was awarded the Fabrizio Lombardi prize in 2016 for his research.

He served on the program committee of O’Reilly Velocity EU in 2017 and 2018 and he is a regular reviewer for journals and conferences in the field of computer networks and systems.