This year again, Scaladays was a blast. It took place in Amsterdam between 8th and 10th June. I was there and here is what I brought back. Apache Spark Is Everywhere That was the most astonishing to me: Spark was everywhere. Spark is a new compute model written in Scala and Akka. At its core, it is a platform to perform transformations and actions on distributed collections. We call those collections Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD).
This post is to introduce browser-coverage, a nifty little CLI tool I have been hacking in Clojure. It looks at your Google Analytics data, you tell it your browser testing plan and it computes how much of your audience it covers in terms of browser support. It’s reached an MVP state but it’s already doing a lot under the hood: data sanitisation, aggregation, employs Logic Programming techniques and more! Have a look at it and let me know what you think.
I can’t think of a better character to incarnate the open source spirit we aspire to within Sky Technology than Pete Mouland. And Pete will leave Sky next Thursday. He used to work with us in the Sales and Service department (SaS). Here he put a lot of energy behind the Global Toolkit, the first successful open source initiative at Sky. Pete left SaS for Sky News before I joined. And that’s where this is brilliant: I shouldn’t have known him.
Donald Ervin Knuth is turning 77 today. He is by far the most fascinating person in the CS world to me. I am going to treat myself and play the total fanboy that I am by telling you my favourite facts about him. Fact #1: One Book, One Life Don Knuth, when 24, agrees to write a book about compilers. You know, something straightforward, à la “Compilers in action”: chapter 1 Lexers, chapter 2 Parsers, chapter 3 Generation.
One excellent thing that comes with the agile methodologies is the set of practices and ceremonies it has popularised if not standardised. Those practices have all one common prime goal: “to heal the divide between business and development“1. It is a good thing to meditate as we could easily believe the main goal in Agile is code quality or developer empowerment. Hell no, it is about trust. Tell me how much your stakeholders trust you, I’ll tell you how agile you are.
We did it! On Wednesday, 24th September 2014, 105 of us gathered at the HolidayInn Brentford: mostly avid software engineers from Online but also few from SkyGo, SkyNews, NowTV, SkySports, Find&Watch and SkyStore. Two themes were the driver for the day: being more joined-up and taking our good ideas to the next level. We had 8 very inspired speakers, 4 determined workshop facilitators and yours truly. You will find below for each part of the day a summary, the slides when relevant and sometimes a video.
Hello World! I am totally excited. Two days ago, during the off-site, I launched this humble blog. As I said there, it’s actually incredibly difficult to reach all the engineers in our department at once. What you are reading now is part of a 3-fold attempt to fix this! But it’s also just a blog really, so to the question “why should you care?”, the answer “maybe you simply shouldn’t” is fine ;-)
On Thursday 17. July 2014, I presented the following at the X-Team Showcase we had that day: In essence, the number of repositories we have on our GitHub account is sky-rocketing: NB: Those data are updated on a regular basis, it’s a live post! This in turn makes it more and more difficult for us to know what we have in there, learn from each other and share the good stuff we have.
On Wednesday 30th April 2014, this was my first All Hands with Online SaS. I presented myself and my role with this pack. For the record, I put it here. I know, the video would render the accent better.