Ryan Peterman

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.

When you say that most people shouldn't, my immediate thought was that one of the big projects you worked on at Dropbox was migrating away from S3.

So why did Dropbox migrate away from S3?