Last week, I traveled out to Colorado to give a keynote at Glue Conference on the hierarchy of developer needs. Video: Slides: Hierarchy of Developer Needs on SpeakerDeck It is a talk that I’ve wanted to give for a while, and what better place to debut it than one of the best developer conferences out there? However, as I rehearsed it, delivered it, and talked to developers afterwards, I realized that I had so much more to say than my slides and script allowed....
This is the third part of the Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE) series. The first entry discussed how to set up Julia on a standard GCE instance, and the second walked through working with Google Cloud Storage from within a Julia program. In this entry, we’ll be diving a little deeper into Julia, and talk about parallel processing. Setting up your instance (reprise) This is when your machine type matters a bit more....
This is the second part of the Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE) series that I started a few weeks back. The first entry addressed how to set up Julia on a standard GCE instance, and how to run simple scripts. Today, we’ll be doing less with Julia, and more with setting things up so you can efficiently write Julia programs and scripts, and make it easy to get the results of your computations....
This blog entry is part one of a series on using Julia with Google Compute Engine. It was inspired by a bit of narcissism, a burning passion for scientific computing, and lackluster experiences with other comparable languages. I recently had the opportunity to answer a question about running Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE), and thought I’d dust off this half-finished blog entry to round it all out. In this entry, we’ll focus on installing Julia on a GCE instance....
My enemy, nighttime Starting from a really early age, I had difficulties sleeping. Let’s call these difficulties insomnia on steroids. I couldn’t fall asleep, and when I did, there was no way I could stay asleep. It impaired my life so much, that I would frequently fall asleep at various points during the day out of sheer exhaustion. Words like narcolepsy were thrown around. Those sleeping pills that are supposed to be a temporary fix looked like they might become a permanent fixture....
There’s a reason that so many people write reflective blog entries at the turn of a new year. We find a need for closure at the end of the old year, to prove to ourselves that it wasn’t wasted, to show the world our accomplishments and failures. As I thought about why I see a flood of entries at this time of year, I realized that I wanted to write one too....
I was really excited for this particular session, as big data an area that people are increasingly tackling, with fascinating results. The panelists included Janet Ramey who is a Senior Director at Cisco, Moira Burke who is a data scientist at Facebook, and Eva K. Lee who holds a professorship at Georgia Tech. Monica Martinez-Canales, a Principal Engineer at Intel, hosted the panel. We started with a broad overview of that question everyone’s asking: what is big data anyway?...
As I walked into this session led by Francine Gordon (F Gordon Group) and Sabina Nawaz (Sabina Nawaz Consulting), I was a little surprised. Instead of rows of chairs facing the front, it looked like we were about to sit down to an organized lunch. Worksheets On the tables were worksheets for attendees to fill out, looking something like this: If you’ve filled out any psychological survey, there’s a high probability that you’ve ranked statements like the ones that were on this sheet, including:...
This session focused on how to build diversity within user groups, told through Jessica McKellar’s experience with the Boston Python User Group. She gives compelling reasons for wanting diversity within these groups, including the development of the group as a community and growing the size and leadership of the community. Goals Jessica set out with the goal to increase the number of women participating by 15%, to showcase women engineers, and to start a movement....
My task of migrating my Wordpress blog to Blogger was surprisingly easy. I could have just started a new blog and used that one from now on, but I didn’t want to maintain two forever, and I didn’t want to have to keep upgrading Wordpress. I allocated half a day to complete the task, and couldn’t believe that it only took 30 minutes. The first thing you want to do is to export your Wordpress blog as a data file....