There Are Several Hard Problems with Big Data
There’s a common misconception that says if I just change one thing in Big Data, everything else will be easier. The answer is that there are several different hard problems in Big Data. Changing one problem doesn’t solve the other problems. Sometimes, I’ll see tweets or posts about how companies or vendors haven’t made Big […]
Asking Better Questions
Learning how to ask good questions is an important life skill. This skill doesn’t just help in business or professional life. It helps in your personal life too. When I’m teaching, I encourage questions. I ask them to ask questions all the time and as often as they’d like. There are two main reasons for […]
The Learning Disconnect
When educational material is created, it starts with a learning objective. It doesn’t matter it’s a book or a video series. This learning objective defines what the book is supposed to teach you. You’ll usually see this learning objective in the title or description of the book. This is supposed to help you choose the […]
Doing Big Data ASAP
I had an interesting question at TDWI Boston that I haven’t been asked before: If you absolutely had to do something with Hadoop and Big Data tomorrow, how would you do it? I’ll answer this from a technical and then a management point of view. Technical I call Apache Hive the Big Data technology you […]
What Happens When You Hire a Data Scientist Without a Data Engineer
Sometimes I’ll train at a company that’s creating a data engineering team. The team often includes a Data Scientist. I’ll always make a note to talk to the Data Scientist about their experience and interactions with the team before I arrived. These Data Scientists are recent hires – within the last 6 months. A clear […]
Personal Project Data Sources
You don’t have previous Big Data experience, but want to get hired as a Data Engineer. Don’t worry, you can get hired. You’ll need a well executed personal project that gets you noticed and shows your skills. I’ve verified this with hiring managers all over the place. They will hire a brand-new person if they […]
Kafka REST and JQuery Helper
I’m open sourcing one of the modules I wrote for my Real-time Data Engineering class. We use Apache Spark and Apache Kafka to process data. Then, we show the data in real-time on a webpage using this JavaScript module to pull in data from Kafka via the Kafka REST interface. The KafkaRESTHelper makes it easier […]
How Are Programming and Distributed Systems Different?
In my book Data Engineering Teams, I separate out programming as a different skill than distributed systems. The section is the “Skills Needed in a Team” and talks about the various skills that a data engineering team needs. Several people have emailed me for clarification about this distinction. Aren’t programming and distributed systems the same […]
Announcement: Data Engineering Teams Book
I’m really tired of seeing Big Data projects fail. They fail for both technical and managerial reasons. They all fail for similar reasons and that’s just sad because we can fix or prevent them. Gartner’s research shows that 85% of Big Data projects don’t even make it into production. Only 15 percent of businesses reported […]
Is Kafka Only a Big Data Tool?
I’ve been teaching Kafka at companies without the textbook definition of Big Data problems. They don’t have, and will not have in the future, what you’d define as Big Data problems. As a result, the students ask me if using Kafka is appropriate for their use cases. Put another way, is Kafka only a Big […]