Speaker interview: Adrien Grand

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded ...

Adrien Grand is based in Caen, France and working as a software engineer at Elasticsearch.

Bbuzz: How did you get started with developing software?
AG: At some point during my studies, I had to choose between engineering science and computer science courses. I hated engineering science so much that I took the computer science course by elimination. This is when I first got exposed to programming. We were taught some Caml and mainly used programming as a way to model mathematical problems. To be honest, I did not especially like it but after a couple of months, we were given an assignment to write a program that would draw a Mandelbrot fractal. This was the most interesting thing I had ever worked on!

Bbuzz: Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
AG: I am going to talk about how Elasticsearch and Lucene work under the hood! But instead if focusing on how it works on the high-level, I will pick some particular features and explain how they are implemented. Come to my talk if you would like to learn more!

Bbuzz: When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
AG: I have been lucky to attend the engineering school where the VideoLAN project (known for VLC media player) started. Until then I had mostly used programming in the context of my studies and I figured out it would be a great way to start learning some actual coding since I had access to the sources of a software which is useful! I did not end up contributing much but just being exposed to an open-source project has been a very valuable experience.

Bbuzz: What's your favourite beer?
AG: Chimay Bleue.

Bbuzz: Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
AG: Yes I have, and what I enjoyed most was Berlin Buzzwords. ;-)

Find out more about Adriens session here.

Corporate-Design: Extragestaltung, Margarethe Hausstätter
Ilustration: cyan, Berlin