Field Reports

A Look Back to Philly ETE 2023

Back In-Person Philly ETE wrapped on April 11th, 2023, and as of the time we publish this post, all the talks are now available to the public. While we are so grateful for the way our attendees embraced a virtual format in 2020, 2021, and 2022, words can’t describe how refreshing it was to gather … Read More

Using the AWS CDK IRL: Part 2

A while back, I wrote a post entitled Using The AWS CDK In Real Life. It was educational, but running Zoneminder on AWS is pretty expensive, and probably isn’t a good idea…

Real World Spark Lessons

I recently built a Spark job that runs every morning to collect the previous day’s data from a few different datasources, join some reference data, perform a few aggregations and write all of the results to Cassandra. All in roughly three minutes (not too shabby).

Firebase: The Good, the Bad, and the… Good Again?

First Contact We were building a small proof of concept for a mobile app, when one of the stakeholders requested that we evaluate Firebase for it. It was my first exposure to Firebase, which looks like it was a cloud database that grew to include authentication, notifications, and other features. On the face of it, … Read More

Overheard: Angular 2 vs. the Portal

On a recent project, we worked on building microservices to support a Portal application. That’s right — Portlets running in IBM’s Portal product. Here are some of the concerns the team faced on the Portal side integrating with Angular 2.

Interesting Talks from Scala Days 2015

I was able to attend Scala Days 2015 in San Francisco and see some excellent presentations on the Scala ecosystem. I’d like to highlight ones that were of particular interest to me.

Apple's Developer Conference

Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) is taking place this week in San Francisco, and a couple of Chariot people are in attendance. Due to some restrictions, we can’t tell about everything they are learning at the sessions, but here’s an overview.

The DataPhilly Meetups

Sujan Kapadia writes: “This year I’ve started going to the DataPhilly meetups, and I think I’m hooked. The bottom line is DataPhilly talks are very intriguing, expose you to topics you don’t encounter everyday, and give you the chance to meet “non-traditional” developers (scientists and statisticians), whose ranks are rapidly growing.”