TEL monthly newsletter – February 2017

08 Mar 2017 TEL monthly newsletter – February 2017

The TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community.  Here’s the latest roundup:

Blogs:

• Darren Cibis blogged about Amazon’s Athena product and compared it to Google’s BigQuery. This post received quite a lot of attention – so much so, that the product managers for both AWS and Google contacted him directly to chat about his findings.

• Graham Polley thought it would be interesting to analyse all the public Stack Overflow data that’s available in BigQuery, and then run sentiment analysis on comments made by posters – spoiler – Python developers are the friendliest bunch of folks on Stack Overflow.

• Dmitry Pokidov wrote a post on generating high-res maps using Mapnik & Docker. This is a great read if you’re also a Macbook Retina display user – and also a Docker lover!

• Fabricio Milone blogged about using AKKA in highly concurrent Java applications.  Building concurrency into any application has always been a complex task – especially in Java (“We’ve got DEADLOCK people!“) – but the AKKA framework helps to makes it easier and abstracts away a lot of the gnarly complexities.

• Graham Polley wanted to do something interesting on his lunch break, so he decided to load all of the publicly available WSPR data into BigQuery – 8 years worth in just 40 minutes! This made fellow Shiner Aaron Brown very happy indeed.

• Michael Leroy detailed how to get rid of long and ugly URLs in AEM.  This is a tricky topic that needs some thought upfront – or else it can get very unruly, very quickly!

• Dmitry Pokidov blogged about how to write safer TypeScript code using strict null checks and type guards. Is it really possible to write safe JavaScript? 😉

• Mario Quintana used his awesome UX skills to help plan his recent wedding. Blog title of the year clearly must go to Mario’s blog here.

Local Meetups:

• Graham Polley, was selected to speak at the 2016 Sydney Devfest where he gave a talk on Google BigQuery, and did a demo of query smashing 100 billion rows (10TB) in 40 seconds!

• Ben Teese did a talk at MelbJS on the recently-released ‘Prettier‘ JS formatting tool, but mostly he just ranted about how code formatting really doesn’t matter that much – to the degree that not only should you let a computer format your code for you, but you should let the computer decide what format to use.

• Ben Teese gave a presentation on React Router v4 at the React Melbourne meetup. Recently, it has gone from alpha into beta, which means that the API has now stabilised. Ben created a screen recording that you can check out here.

• Peter Fuggle managed to wrangle the Melbourne Docker meetup group to the Shine offices for a great Docker meetup. I think it’s safe to say that everyone enjoyed the office view – and the talks of course 😉

• Graham Polley presented at the GDG (Google Developer Group) meetup in Feb, and spoke about Google’s swanky new Cloud Vision API, which uses advanced ML under the hood. He also demoed the API working on his Raspberry-Pi. Shine also hosted the Jan GDG meetup.