Another week with three more meetups! They’re all data-focused as I’m trying to get the word out about the YOW! Data Call for Presentations, which closes on March 18th.

The first was Sydney Cassandra Users, which had a special guest speaker all the way from the US – Rachel Pedreschi from GridGain!

Rachel gave us a thorough introduction to Apache Ignite – an open source caching layer that can sit on top of Cassandra. (She admitted that it’s also a database in its own right.) Not many of us were familiar with it, so it was great to get a tour from someone who knows it very well.

My second meetup of the week is one that I’ve been keen to check out from the first time I saw its inventive acronym: SURF (Sydney Users of R Forum). The speaker was Dr. Fabian Held from Sydney Uni speaking about using R for network analysis.

I found this fascinating. (You can read his whole talk here.) Dr. Held pointed out that research has shown your social network can influence your probability of being obese or having certain diseases. By mapping the relationships in the network, we can analyse it in some interesting ways. The tool used in the demos was tidygraph, an API for graph manipulation.

One of my favourite takeaways from the talk was of the existence of Zachary’s Karate Club. This was a real social club studied by researcher Wayne W. Zachary in the 70’s and the data set of relationships is available for for you play with. It’s a bit of a meme among scientists who study networks. How delightfully obscure!

My last meetup of the week was Sydney Machine Learning at the AWS offices in Sydney. I remember attending this one just after it started a year ago – it’s a huge group now!

The first speaker was Luke Metcalfe of Microburbs talking about what data science is, what makes a good data scientist, and how to hire and motivate good ones. I especially liked some of his advice for getting into data science: “Good data beats the best model.”

The second talk was Dr. Elaina Hyde, an astrophysicist and consultant at Servian. As a dyed-in-the-wool space geek, this was definitely my favourite talk of the week. Dr. Hyde talked about using data science techniques in her analysis of the Sagittarius Stream. It was fascinating!

Other Stuff

  • There was an interesting discussion on Twitter last week about engineers being “on call” for support. John Barton wrote a nice summary of the debate here as well as the approach he takes with his teams. (John gave a great talk about this at the YOW! CTO Summit in 2016.)
  • What’s your view on the AMP letter? For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with Tim Kadlec. I think giving some search engine juice to pages that are secure and load quickly is a good idea… but it needs to be based on a objective measure, not use of a single tool.
  • YOW!’s speaker development program for women in tech has launched for 2018! We have rebranded it as New Voices in Tech (as it’s not really about competition) and it’s open to all women in Australia. If you are selected, you’ll receive a full day of speaker training with Damian Conway (who is amazing). Well worth entering if you want to learn to be a better speaker!