TEL Newsletter – June 2018

01 Jun 2018 TEL Newsletter – June 2018

Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011, initially as a money-laundering operation. We publicise the great technical work that Shine does, and raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meetup talks, and conference presentations. We curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to and publish a newsletter, in accordance with a mystical schedule that you wouldn’t understand. Read on for this edition.

Blogs:

• Shahin released Parts 3 and 4 of his music recommendation engine series. These parts covered getting your ML engine a job in the local record store, and tackling the inevitable drug addiction that comes from working in the entertainment industry. There’s a plugin for Tensorflow that corrects these issues.
  

  Yeah, nah. You probably want the mainstream section, that’s for people like you.

• Matt Fraser played around with Google’s new AutoML, trying to identify dangerous spiders. Even though he confuses poisonous with venomous in the title, he still made the big time on Hacker News, and got mentioned in a Google I/O keynote. Matt no longer speaks to us, and all contact is mediated via his publicist, Chantelle. He’s rumoured to be producing his own clothing line and fragrances.
  

  Just look at her. No way she’s venomous. I’m going to pet her. Ow. Woozy. Nnnnng.

• David Ensikat, whose name reads the same forwards and backwards, penned a monograph on his experience sitting the AWS exam for Systems Administrators. I’ll certainly be making use of his excellent tip for putting vaseline on my teeth for that perfect smile in the swimsuit round.
  

  David recommends you eat at least this amount of performance-enhancing drugs before taking the exam.

   

• Graham Polley, no longer a member of Shine (musical differences), spat out yet another blog on BigQuery Partitioning. We will not refer to him again.
• Darren Cibis attended the Google Cloud Community Conference, because he’s one of the organisers for GDG Cloud Melbourne, and shared his tips on bypassing Google’s mind control techniques. He was totally not brainwashed at all, why would you say that?
  

  Please let me sleep. Of course I love Google and only Google. I just want to sleep.

   

• Sonya Zhao wrote about A/B Testing using Adobe and Angular. Just remember kids: life is one big A/B test, and you’re not in the control group. No, I don’t really understand what that means either, sounds pretty profound though. I should tweet it from my inspirational quotes account.
  

  Soon we will all be dead, and nobody will remember us. Your legacy is dust and disappointment. Give up on your dreams.

Presentations & meetups:

• Aaron Brown talked to the Chatbots Melbourne meetup about the Alexa skill they wrote for Energy Australia. Now Alexa can tell you exactly how much electricity it is consuming by recording everything you say, all the time.
• Gareth Jones delivered his talk on Image Recognition to the GDG Cloud Sydney Meetup. That was the fourth time he’d given that talk, and it isn’t getting any better.
• Gareth also spoke at YOW! Data 2018, giving a talk on Sentiment Analysis. Many people thought that this was entirely adequate and not at all as bad as they thought it would be. There does not appear to be any photographic evidence of him on the stage, only ones of him drinking beer at the conference.
  

  Exhibit A: I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that this man needs to exercise more and drink less. (Old people in the audience will be interested to learn that the person Gareth is speaking to used to work for Melbourne House, a games company that made The Hobbit back in the eighties)

   

• Ben Teese, fresh from playing Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, gave a talk at the React Melbourne meetup about his experiments in developer cloning. Sure, a few monsters were created, but on the whole it was a great success.
• The Adobe Experience Cloud Meetup was hosted at Shine in May, with Cliff Subagio from Shine talking about the Open Source platform they’ve built.

Upcoming things & other random news:

• The next GDG Cloud Melbourne meetup will be at Shine’s HQ on June 14. Come along for some talks on Cloud Spanner.
• Stewart Burnell qualified as a Certified Google Data Engineer, which allows him access to the special Google Data Engineer Toilet at Google HQ, but not access to Google HQ itself.
• Ben Teese will be spreading his tentacles to NDC Sydney in September, speaking about building cross-platform React apps and how to crush your enemies under the feet of your army of followers.
• Cliff Subagio will speak at Jenkins World again this year in September. Cliff has been involved with Jenkins for many years, back when it was called Hudson, and before that when it was called “Lower Class Man Servant”, and even when it was called “Resentful Seething Downtrodden Underclass Fomenting Rebellion”.
• Cliff will also be speaking at Adobe Immerse (June 12-15), if you want more Cliff in your life, and who doesn’t?