TEL Newsletter – February 2018

16 Feb 2018 TEL Newsletter – February 2018

Shine’s 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 in the community through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Every now and then (it started off as being monthly, but that was too much work), we curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to, and publish a newsletter. Read on for this month’s edition.

Blogs:

• Ben Teese wrote about server-side rendering using React Router V4 and Redux – something us mere mortals can’t even come close to comprehending.
• Shahin Namin – Shine’s ML guru – wrote his first ever blog about building a song recommendation engine on Google Cloud Platform. Whilst developing it, Taylor Swift could be heard from his speakers, which helped drown out the sound of his CPU fan spinning at a gazillion RPM as he trained his TensorFlow models.
• Tony Rogers loves names. Like, really loves names. He wrote a blog demonstrating all of the bad assumptions we can make when designing a system that processes people’s names.  Fascinating.
• Graham Polley blogged about how to schedule BigQuery jobs using Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions. If we see one more blog about BigQuery from him, we’re taking away his Google toys, and making him use AWS Redshift for the rest of the year.
• Stewart Burnell doesn’t like code. Mainly because he’s no good at it. But, also because not writing code is actually a pretty good idea. So, he wrote about deleting lots of legacy code in some projects he works on, and replacing it all with some of Google’s new cloud services.

• Shahin is on a roll! His second post in as many months. This time a follow up to his initial blog, but deep diving a bit more into the guts of how his song recommendation engine looks under the hood on Google Cloud – and putting a hack in code to filter out Taylor Swift from his playlist so as not to embarrass himself.

• Aaron Brown dished up the details on how Shine helped EnergyAustralia build its first skill on Amazon’s voice activated device, Alexa.  Now you’ll be able to ask Alexa all about your gas and electric bills on demand. What a time to be alive!

Presentations & meetups:

• Shahin Namin (see blogs above) gave a presentation at the February Google Cloud Meetup on this song recommendation engine running on Google Cloud. The feedback for the talk was terrific. Well done Shahin.
• Yogi Langnickel gave a talk at the Ruby Meetup in Melbourne on cypress.io. He really loves this framework and it’s clear (*cough*) to see why. Everyone loves testing! High five!

Upcoming things & other random news:

• Shine hosted the February Google Cloud Melbourne Meetup. It was a big turn out, and the beer fridge was decimated during the course of the night. Nice work. Always the sign of a good Meetup.
• Congratulations to Gareth Jones and Graham Polley, both of whom passed their Google Certified Data Engineer exam. Gareth said it was easy and Graham said it was hard. Hmmm.
• Some more certifications were bagged, this time on the AWS front: David Ensikat passed his AWS SysOps exam, and Kai Xai passed the AWS Solution Architect one. Wowsers. Certifications up the wazoo!

• Google’s Felipe Hoffa flew into town and recorded a video with Graham Polley in the beautiful city of Melbourne. They whizzed around on a tram, and spun up a massive Dataflow cluster to process billions of records before the tram reached the city – using their phones for internet! We just hope they touched on.
• Shine will be hosting the next Google Cloud Melbourne Meetup on March 8th. It’s a special one, as they’ll be celebrating/supporting IWD so get yourself along to it.