Exploring Ideas: A Blog on Technology, Startups, Food, and More
Welcome to my blog where I share thoughts and insights on technology, startups, and life in Atlanta. Browse through the articles below or explore by topic.
The Problem with Industrial IoT
January 16, 2018
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been heralded as the next great revolution in manufacturing. The promise of connecting every device, sensor, and machine to gather data and optimize processes is compelling. Yet the reality of implementing IIoT solutions has proven to be much more challenging than initially anticipated. The Current State The promise of IIoT is compelling: Real-time moni...
Revisiting Python support in Apache Flink
January 11, 2018
A couple of years ago I wrote two posts on the fledgling support for python in Apache Flink. To this day, a pretty significant amount of the people who end up on this site from google, end up here after a search for how to use python and flink together, so I thought it would be a good idea to check back in. I pulled down the bleeding-edge version of flink, exactly the same as I did last time, and ...
Tendencies of Data Engineers and Scientists
January 9, 2018
In a previous post, I defined the key difference between data engineers and data scientists: data engineers apply engineering methodologies to data problems, while data scientists apply the scientific method to data problems. This fundamental difference in approach leads to interesting dynamics when these roles interact within organizations. The Core Dynamic The relationship between data engineeri...
I Made a Model, Now What?
January 4, 2018
Last October, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at PyData Atlanta - a fantastic meetup that I highly recommend for anyone in the Atlanta area. While I’d given lightning talks before, this was my first longer format presentation, and the feedback was positive. Key Themes The presentation focused on three critical aspects of model deployment that every data scientist should consider: Getting model...
Year's End: Looking back on 2017
December 28, 2017
Note: This post has been migrated from my previous blog. Some links and references may point to posts that haven’t been migrated to this new site. As 2017 draws to a close, I’m looking back on a year of posts and on what all I did in open source. This past year had decidedly fewer posts than 2016, where I was posting a few times a month pretty consistently, but there were still some nice posts th...
On taking things too seriously: holiday edition
December 9, 2017
For some reason Atlanta got a pretty significant amount of snow yesterday, and because of that I’ve been mostly stuck at home. When faced with that kind of time on hand, sometimes I spend too much time on things that don’t really matter all that much. Recently, I’ve been fascinated with rating systems (see a post on Elote here), so that was in the front of my mind this week. Every year, around thi...
Elote: a python package of rating systems
December 6, 2017
Recently I’ve been interesting in rating systems. Around here the application most front of mind for those is college football rankings. In general, imagine any case you have a large population of things you want to rank, and only a limited set of head-to-head matchups between those things to use for building your ratings. Without a direct comparison point between each possible pair, you’ve got to...
Ripyr: sampled metrics on datasets using python's asyncio
November 28, 2017
Today I’d like to introduce a little python library I’ve toyed around with here and there for the past year or so, ripyr. Originally it was written just as an excuse to try out some newer features in modern python: asyncio and type hinting. The whole package is type hinted, which turned out to be a pretty low level of effort to implement, and the asyncio ended up being pretty speedy. But first the...
Category Encoders v1.2.5 Release
November 22, 2017
This release was actually cut a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot to put a post here. It’s been a release of mainly incremental changes, but also one of increased contributions from the community, so while not a huge feature-packed release, it’s one I’m particularly proud of. Here’s to more like this. It was around 4 months since the last release, which I think is a pretty decent cadence, consider...
Standing Peachtree Park
November 20, 2017
Standing Peachtree Park is one of Atlanta’s lesser-known historical sites, yet it holds significant importance in the city’s history. Located at the confluence of Peachtree Creek and the Chattahoochee River, this site marks one of the earliest settlements in what would become Atlanta. Historical Significance The site was originally home to a Creek Indian village called Standing Peachtree, which se...
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