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.
TechEmergence Podcast and Atlanta AI Article
June 3, 2018
I recently had the opportunity to join Daniel Faggella on the TechEmergence podcast to discuss predictive maintenance and the growing AI ecosystem in Atlanta. The conversation covered a range of topics from industrial applications of AI to the unique characteristics of Atlanta’s technology community. Predictive Maintenance Discussion We explored several key aspects of predictive maintenance in ind...
Rethinking Innovation Labs: Bridging Promises and Reality
April 16, 2018
Innovation labs have become increasingly popular in large corporations over the past decade. These dedicated spaces and teams are meant to foster creativity, drive innovation, and help companies stay competitive in rapidly evolving markets. But their effectiveness and value proposition deserve careful scrutiny. The Promise Innovation labs promise to be the answer to disruption - a way for large co...
On Discipline of Creation
April 7, 2018
Engineering is at its core a creative endeavor. Entrepreneurship as well. To excel at either is to be fundamentally good at consistently creating solutions to problems, at creating semantic understandings of problems, and to communicate one’s work well. The Need for Creative Training It is critical for engineers and entrepreneurs to train their creativity. Like any skill there is some degree of ta...
Data Engineering Podcast
February 20, 2018
I recently had the opportunity to join Tobias Macey on the Data Engineering Podcast to discuss my work at Predikto and share insights about data engineering in the industrial IoT space. We covered a range of topics including predictive maintenance, the challenges of working with industrial data, and the evolution of data engineering practices in heavy industry. Key Discussion Points The unique cha...
Category Encoders published in JOSS
January 26, 2018
The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a formal academic peer-reviewed journal (ISSN 2475-9066), intended to be “developer friendly”. What does that really mean? If you have a project on github, that has some novel value, and is well written, then in probably 30-40 minutes of working time, you can put together a submission. The reviews all take place in github issues, and I got some helpful...
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...
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