Broadcasting live from the recently concluded Velocity Conference 2013 in Santa Clara, theCUBE host John Furrier interviewed Jonathan LeBlanc, Head of Developer Evangelism, PayPal, about web performance, user experience and data mining.

At Velocity, LeBlanc was amazed by the variety of topics; the event ranges from talks about API design to subjects such as data mining and the principles behind that. The topic of performance leads to numerous other paths, to whole new realms, because of so many intelligent people all combined together. Talking about adaptability, LeBlanc said that “The full-stack engineer is the new front-end engineer.”

In one of his tweets, LeBlanc revealed that “100 ms in performance can be a shift of millions of dollars for customers”. Users perceive latency as a shut-down, so latency generates a lot of user drop-outs. As you lose users, it correlates with loss in monetization.

• Working with new tech & trends

LeBlanc is familiar with the node concepts from the days spent at Yahoo. There are pockets of people who love working in /with newer technologies, but others are scared that it hasn’t hit 1.0.

And then you have eBay introducing ql.io to be a data mash-up engine for the APIs. It is reminiscent of other projects like YQL on Yahoo stack or FQL on Facebook stack. It’s a simple querring language system.

Stack conversations are really relevant because that is a trend in DevOps today.

On the UI realm, there’s a proliferation of Javascript models coming out that have to do with visualization of framework and D3.js for vizualization of data. Then you have mechanisms like Bootstrap on the UI front, and data UI separation. “I see every project known to man coming out on Javascript,” said LeBlanc.

• Accelerating from the bottom up

What is accelerating from the bottom up? The industry is growing very organically. In the beginning the people who were engineering the systems were kind of in a closed box, doing their work based on a pragmatic approaches to the API design. They were building the perfect system for themselves and for their companies. “When I was starting working in the Developer Evangelism, I tried bridging between companies, and they would typically put us in the back corner.”

Within PayPal we see the difference and the changes in the industry, where the Evangelism Teams are becoming a cornerstone towards all the effort that’s being done. And, in doing so, developers are becoming the cornerstone. “What the developer community wants to see from an API leads to the redesign of the API, and to all the changes in the industry,” believes LeBlanc.  The API service layer is the future, the fastest way to do things.

Wrapping up with data-mining, LeBlanc was pretty stern: “Whenever I talk about data mining it comes down to ‘Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’.”