Ryan Peterman

Were there spare machines that the college had or was this in the cloud?

When you look back on you getting the PhD in academia, being enabled to completely explore an idea versus going into industry, but maybe you worked on Spanner at Google or something like that.

When you look back, which path do you think would be better and why?

Going to your time in industry, at Dropbox, you became the most senior engineer at the company.

And looking through all the projects that you did, I had a series of just technical curiosities.

I saw this idea early in your career about multi-homing, and I wasn't familiar with that concept.

What is multi-homing?

What's the problem it solves?

So it's just another term for, I guess, data replication and having it available in other regions.

Absolutely.

I imagine also, I mean, the cost of storage is a concern.

How many replicas would you keep for something?

Like let's just say I stored something in Dropbox.

It's my document.

Is that on the order of one or two or is there multiple?

So with erasure and coding, my, my document in Dropbox is fragmented into a bunch of different chunks of data and loaded potentially from many different machines.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, the first thought I have is now there's... I might be waiting there and one of the 27 machines is slow and I can't look at the whole doc.

So how do you prevent against that?

So you can over-subscribe, over-request, and then you complete on a portion of them being received.