An expert perspective with Luca Mezzalira

Tecknuovo
Dec 3, 2020
  • 6 min read

Following on from last months event, we were joined by Luca Mezzalira, VP of Architecture at DAZN, for our November Ask Me Anything event. The event took place over on our Teck Camp community Slack channel. At DAZN—a cloud-based sports video platform that offers content to a sizeable user base – Luca administers various OTT-centric issues involving governance, scalability and resilience. During his time at DAZN, he has gained accolades for revolutionising the scalability of frontend architectures with micro-frontends, increasing the efficiency of workflows, and delivering quality in products. His colleagues know him as an excellent communicator who believes in using an interactive approach for understanding and solving problems of varied scopes.

We were excited to have Luca join us for the evening and picked his brain on topics ranging from advice on how to prevent microservices and APIs from sprawling, the future of AI and Machine Learning, career and industry highlights, top tips on public speaking, and much more. We’ve put together this article to give an overview of the evening. Remember that you can view the entire transcript of the evening over on the Teck Camp Slack in the #ask-me-anything channel.

Microservices and APIs

It’s very easy for microservices and APIs to get out of control and you can find yourself with 100s of microservices all doing the same thing if you aren’t careful.

“To prevent this sprawl, you usually start with a plan that should be detailed enough for writing the first microservice. During the transition period towards this architecture, you will realise there are tools to build, wrong assumption made and sometimes code duplicated that can be abstracted in libraries. It’s part of the journey and depends what you are optimising for.”

Luca stressed the main challenge is in finding the right trade off and understanding why you are embracing the architecture. Once you know the why, this can guide you when making decisions.

The future of AI and Machine Learning

On looking to the future of machine learning and artificial intelligence, Luca saw the main challenge for the two technologies being the ability to make them accessible for a broader audience, not only the non-techies but also techies as well.

“They need to unwind the intrinsic complexity behind the practice, hide it for the masses and providing access to it for the experts.”

“I hope AI and ML would allow to enhance our day to day providing better and more accurate / relevant information for all of us. They will probably replace certain jobs, but I think their advent in the society will help in many ways. From pharmaceutic to entertainment industries, everyone will benefit for the evolution of these technologies.”

Career highlights

Having worked in the tech industry since 2014, with his expertise predominately in the solution architecture field, Luca has had an impressive career history across a number of different industries. Trying to pin down his favourite might be tricky, but he thoroughly enjoys his time in the media industry.

“We are in the middle of a transformation moving from cable providers to streaming and I don’t believe many people are lucky enough to see a profound change like this one in their own career.

I feel very lucky to be honest. The part I love the most is that there is still a lot to discover and learn, we are scratching the surface of what the capabilities are and what we can really do merging videos with the web platforms. It’s an incredibly exciting journey where there is still a lot to discover from a technical and product perspective.”

With still so much to discover, Luca hinted at which sports he believed would benefit from the merging of videos and the web platform:

“Esports as well traditional sports will benefit from this marriage, currently the experience is still a lean back one where people sit in front of a TV consuming their favourite sports. What if we can engage with them in different ways? What if we can create local communities like you do physically when you go to a football match. I think it’s doable and with the advent of AI and ML we can even enhance the users experience adding more relevant content for them from advertising to content produced by the community. We can really fill the empty spots with plenty of good content on different device”

It seems the possibilities are endless when you combine TV with the interactively brought by web technologies. We’ll certainly be watching this space to see the developments in the next couple years!

As well as being an expert in architecture, Luca is also a published writer with the second of his two books due out in 2021 (Link to book). He managed to tick off one from the bucket list with this project and fulfilled his dream to be published by O’Reilly.

“It’s really exciting being published. Of course, it is really hard writing them but it’s extremely rewarding when you finally can hold the book in your hands. Becoming an author for O’Reilly made me incredibly proud of the journey I've made.”

Public Speaking

Some of us at Tecknuovo have been lucky enough to see Luca speak at events (pre-Covid-19) and so we were keen to ask him for his top tips on how to be a great public speaker.

“Practice, practice, practice! It’s key to present on something you are passionate about and find a meetup to talk at. Meetups are the best environment to practice at as they’re free, expectations aren’t as high as in conferences and you can find really interesting people who’ll provide good feedback.”

We’re all hoping it won’t be too long until we get to see Luca and our other favourite speakers in action again soon. Luca, like many others has taken to taking part in talks online these days and was happy to point us in the direction of his next few talks:

From being an expert in his field, to writing books, to public speaking, it’s clear Luca isn’t afraid of hard work! If you want to discover more about this from Luca, make sure you check out the following sites for more impactful lessons on learning:

Want to learn more?

Thank you to all who took part in the Ask Me Anything with Luca Mezzalira! A huge thank you to Luca especially for taking the time out for us to ask him our unanswered questions. It was great to be able to pick his brain! You can follow Luca on Twitter, @lucamezzalira

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