Peter wrote up this interview back in August 2009, so I’m a little late to this party. There’s some really great quotes in this interview. Here’s a few of my fav quotes from Cross:

At Google, the research scientists prototype in python and R, and then port to C++ for the real scalable map reduce runs.

Building layer upon layer of abstraction is a big key…  The technical term for this is “wrap the crap.”

Here’s a problem I think anyone who works with data and models can relate to:

I made a lot of mistakes early in my career in building trading models where I let me theories get too far ahead of what I could really test in practice. That is not a good place to be. Unfortunately, this is an easy mistake to make.