In this talk, I’ll share my story of how I went from being Lars’ PhD student, doing theoretical computer science, to working as a software engineer in industry. Along the way, I was an intern, joined a PL startup (and, ironically, didn’t do any PL), and ventured into the fabled land of the American tech industry—eventually ending up at Databricks, working with cloud infrastructure.

In the second part of the talk, I’ll give a high-level introduction to infrastructure as code (IaC) and explain what makes it particularly challenging to build and maintain cloud infrastructure at Databricks. I’ll also present a policy framework we’ve developed that allows us to implement and enforce internal security policies for IaC, leveraging the fact that IaC templates are themselves programs. This makes it possible to reason about infrastructure safely before it’s deployed.