2025-11-07 –, Room 340
DateTime objects are a staple in almost every codebase, but they often come with hidden complexities that lead to frustrating bugs and confusing decisions. In this talk, I’ll take you through the journey of working on an Apache Pinot PR, where DateTime handling was one of the key challenges. What started as an attempt to build a robust, feature-rich solution quickly turned into a lesson in the power of simplicity. I'll share how we simplified the approach to DateTime handling, why that decision was critical, and what it taught me about the importance of simplicity in software development.
In this talk, I’ll dive into the challenges faced while implementing a simple optimizer in Apache Pinot. What seemed like a simple feature quickly became a tangled mess of edge cases and complex logic. After several iterations, I realized that simplifying the approach rather than trying to cover every possible edge case was the key to success. I’ll walk through the decisions made to streamline the feature and share how this experience reinforced the importance of focusing on simplicity in development.
I'll also share some tips on where and when to seek a more complexed, nuanced solution and when to accept the simple approaches. By the end, you'll have a better understanding of how to balance simplicity and complexity when building software, and how to know when each approach is the right choice.
https://github.com/apache/pinot/commits/master/?author=ashishjayamohan
Ashish Jayamohan is a current contributor on Apache Pinot. Ashish was formerly an undergraduate student at UC San Diego and is now working on databases, systems, and machine learning. Ashish is specifically interested in autotuning and optimization.
@ashishjayamohan