Motivation/Prelude

In my last article I explained the broad strokes of the Hadoop ecosystem and you can read about it here. What is important about that article is the end, which I will blatantly plagiarise from my other article as it serves as the beginning of this one too:

Now, if you have been sort of listening in on Hadoop’s ecosystem over the last few years you would have seen that the two biggest players on the market — Cloudera and Hortonworks — merged around a year ago amid a slow down of the Hadoop big data market. Add the…

The goal of this article is to introduce you to some key concepts in the buzzword realm of Big Data. After reading this article — potentially with some additional googling — you should be able to (more or less) understand how this whole Hadoop thing works.

So, to be more precise in this article you will:

• Learn a lot of definitions (yay)
• Spin up a Hadoop cluster with a few bells and whistles via docker-compose.
• Understand Parquet files and how to convert your csv datasets into Parquet files.
• Run SQL (technically HiveQL but it is very similar) queries on your…

“Data is the new oil.”, “Our company needs to become more efficient.”, “Can we optimize this process?”, “Our processes are too complicated.” — sentences you have heard very often and maybe cannot hear anymore. It is understandable but there are some actual real world benefits that stem from the technologies and discussions behind the super trend of (Big) Data. One of the emerging technologies in this field is in more ways than one directly linked to the sentences above. It is process mining. Maybe you have heard of it. Maybe you have not. …

Recently I decided to embark on the journey of creating a sample project of the ELK stack that works with Spring Boot and PostgreSQL — all in Docker with a docker-compose. No SaaS. While there are a lot of sample projects for any given web framework because of how popular ELK has grown, in my opinion, there was no clear path to the finish line for Spring Boot.

My sample Spring Boot app spring-elastic-genie has a REST API that looks for movies in OMDB and saves the results in PostgreSQL. These results then get indexed by Elasticsearch at which point…

If you are a Deep Learning researcher or afficionando and you happen to love using Macs privately or professionally, every year you get the latest and greatest disappointing AMD upgrade for your GPU. Why is it disappointing? Because you get the latest and greatest Vega GPU that of course does not use CUDA.

What is CUDA and why is this a big deal?

CUDA® is a parallel computing platform and programming model developed by NVIDIA for general computing on graphical processing units (GPUs). With CUDA, developers are able to dramatically speed up computing applications by harnessing the power of GPUs.

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Let us dive into a topic every techie loves and loves to hate and hates to love: Android vs. iOS. Now this has been done a million times, so what could I possibly add to it? Some thoughts on one of the new IT battlegrounds: mobility.

I say mobility because this is the term used by giants like Daimler and BMW. At this point everybody knows that the future of mobility is a blend of car sharing on the one hand and autonomous driving and companies like Uber and Tesla in the long term on the other. …

I have been meaning to start writing again for the longest time (think years). And today seemed like the right day to do so; if there is such a thing as right. My first topic is one I have spent a lot of time with in the past 6 months. Namely how to make money with Artifical Intelligence. When I say AI I don’t mean AGI (Artificial General Intelligence — as in Asimov’s iRobot stuff), I mean plain ol’ Deep Learning (around since the 80s — thanks Geoffrey Hinton) and Machine Learning in general.

Currently, the money seems to revolve…