I recently finished the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera. Having primarily programmed in an imperative language (Java), I enjoyed all the goodies that provided by a functional language. Overall, I enjoyed the class very much, and I recommend it to anyone looking for an introduction to functional…

I recently finished reading the popular Design Patterns book. As I was reading, I noticed that many of the examples used in the book were a bit difficult to parse. For several patterns, they used the example of building a WSISYG editor, something with which I don’t have much experience…

Over the past few weeks, I have been working with Apache ZooKeeper for a certain project at work. …

In celebration of Super Bowl Sunday, this post will examine how HBase can be used to model NFL play-by-play data. We will be using data from the 2002 season through the 2012 season. The source of the data is CSV files provided by the awesome people at Advance NFL Stats…

HBase is modeled as: A “sparse, distributed, consistent, multi-dimensional, sorted map” We will look at what each of these terms mean below. HBase is based on Google’s BigTable and is currently an Apache top-level project. It provides random read/write access to data stored in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). It…

In this post, I will go through a demo of using Lucene’s simple API for indexing and searching Tweets. We will be indexing Tweets from the Sentiment140 Tweet corpus. This dataset provides the following data points for each Tweet: the polarity of the tweet (0 = negative, 2 = neutral…

Apache Lucene™ is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform. Lucene is a library that allows the user to index textual data (Word & PDF documents, emails, webpages, tweets etc). It…