Qconn

Dropbox Photos - Building abstractions on top of the file system

Location: 
Grand Ballroom - Salon D
Abstract: 

"Dropbox is moving away from a file-folder centric view of user data to a content-centric view. This talk will focus on a couple of the abstractions we've built on top of the file system - metadata indexing and virtual collections - that enable rich interactions with the content type in question. Photos is the first content vertical to take this approach - abstracting away the file-folder view from the user but, underneath the covers, staying constantly in sync with it. We'll go into some of the technical details of the general-purpose infrastructure we've built in this regard and the product experiences they enable."

Ramesh Balakrishnan's picture
Ramesh Balakrishnan studied Computer Science at Stanford (BS, MS) in between ultimate frisbee tournaments and social dance classes. He then spent 6.5 years at Google where he largely worked on Google Maps building search backends and enabling community editing of map data. He wrapped up his Google stint working on a realtime graph-based system for ranking content in social streams. He explored starting up his own company before realizing he could have even more impact at Dropbox - he's currently an engineer there leading the Photos team.