Has an user ever asked to adjust data on a dashboard within Looker? Has an user ever asked you for a Looker report to behave like Excel? Has an user asked for a magic button that will solve all their data problems? It’s not always a good idea to give…

Introduction Manual creation of presentations for Google Slides with GumGum is time-consuming, but it can be streamlined through automation to a great extent by utilizing a custom template-based presentation language for Google Slides, resulting in significant time savings. At GumGum we decided to develop a tool called Decks to streamline this…

Introduction In the fast-paced world of digital advertising, milliseconds can make all the difference. Ad exchanges are platforms where publishers and advertisers come together to buy and sell ad inventory in real-time. The speed at which these transactions occur is crucial for both parties. For advertisers, a slow ad exchange can…

Authentic Leadership — How to feel like DevOps During a recent retrospective with my team, I realized that despite consistently delivering high-value projects and meeting our organization’s objectives, none of my team members identified themselves as “DevOps Engineers” Instead, they primarily described their roles along the lines of release engineering and cloud support. Although this makes them check…

For decades, theoretical physicists have been trying to come up with a grand unification theory. By unification, it means uniting two or more ideas that were thought to be as completely distinct, proving their different aspects as the same underlying phenomena. An example is prior to the 19th century, electricity…

Introduction There is no doubt that constructive feedback is a catalyst for growth and improvement in any endeavor, and it holds immense power, especially in the fast-paced world of software development. The expertise of Quality Assurance (QA) teams lie in providing valuable feedback throughout the software development life cycle, aiding in…

Eliminate downtime due to cluster spin-up and initializations Spark Structured Streaming, when deployed on Databricks, is a great solution for executing real-time streaming workflows at scale. In Spark’s driver-worker architecture, a driver program consumes from an input source like Kafka and delegates tasks to executors. As discussed in a previous…

Introduction In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, the ability to continuously integrate and deploy applications is crucial for achieving shorter development cycles, faster time-to-market, and improved overall software quality. However, implementing effective and efficient continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) processes can be a daunting challenge, often plagued by complex…

Introduction Looker, a powerful business intelligence tool, is designed to unlock significant value for your organization. It can be utilized for a variety of tasks, ranging from monitoring key performance metrics to validating specific queries. For users, one of the most important aspects to consider is the tool’s performance. Dashboards need…