Archive for Life category

COVID19 and New Life

I’ve been doing a ton of writing and speaking, just not here. My first post on Medium is on COVID-19 myths and has a ton of links to reliable data sources to help dispel them. I’ve been writing some on the Vertica blog, doing a few projects for O’Reilly, and I’ve been writing my usual web content and technical architecture papers. But the main thing I’ve spent my time on in the last couple of years is public speaking. I was set to travel 5 weeks out of the last six to speak at conferences. That didn’t exactly happen.

Read more...
Happy 10 Years Hadoop

Ten Years of Hadoop, Apache Nifi and Being Alone in a Crowd

Hadoop Summit in San Jose this year celebrated Hadoop’s 10th birthday. All of the folks on stage are people who contributed to Hadoop during those 10 years. One of them is Yolanda Davis.

Yolanda and I worked together on a Hortonworks project last year. She was in charge of the user interface design and development team. I caught up with her early in the morning of the last day of Hadoop Summit, and quizzed her on this new project she’s working on that you may have heard of, Apache Nifi. As promised, here is my interview with her on the subject of Nifi and the new HDF (Hortonworks Data Flow) streaming data processing platform, which includes Nifi, Apache Kafka and Apache Storm.

Read more...
Holden Karau's audience at High Performance Spark preso at Data Day Texas

Interviews with Brilliant People on Hadoop and the Future of Big Data Tech

I have been doing some very cool interviews with brilliant people, usually at events like Strata + Hadoop World and Hadoop Summit. The intention is to use their brilliant thoughts so that I don’t have to take the extra time to come up with my own. Not to mention I get the bonus of learning new things, and getting the unique perspectives of folks who really know their stuff. Nothing like learning tech from the folks who literally wrote the book on it.

Read more...
Herbert the Syncsort Big Data mascot on a cup

Coffee Cups, Women in Tech, and Rampant Competence

2016 marks my nineteenth year in the field of data wrangling. Yee haw. (I’m from Texas. I can say that.) January also marks my first year, my first week in fact, at my new job at Syncsort. I flew up to the company headquarters in New Jersey and spent the first week of the year getting to know the new team and the new technology. Certain things jumped out at me as good signs. It started with a coffee cup.

Read more...
David and Goliath

Pitching Stones with David

It’s a brand new year, and I’ve got a brand new job. As of today, you’re looking at the new Product Marketing Manager for Syncsort.

It’s true. After spending half a year doing a little freelance white paper work for the Bloor Group, and documenting for Hortonworks the most complex ETL process I’ve seen in nearly two decades in the business, I’ve found a new home to settle into. I got courted by some Goliaths in the data management software and hardware space, but in the end, I chose a tech savvy David, Syncsort.

Read more...
Load More
10 of 16