BigQuery & new users – the top “WTF!?” moments

May 31, 2017June 1, 2017 Graham Polley 1 Comment

“What the Fudge?”

I use Google BigQuery a lot. On a daily basis I run dozens of queries, use it to build massively scalable data pipelines for our clients, and regularly help new users navigating it for the first time. Suffice it to say I’m somewhat accustomed to its little quirks. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the new users who are commonly left scratching their heads, and shouting “What the fudge!?” at their monitors.

Here’s the top three WTFs that I regularly hear from new BigQuery users:

Cloud/Opinion

AWS Sydney Partner Day and Summit Roundup

May 2, 2017May 8, 2017 Nic Hobbs 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to head up to Sydney to attend the AWS Partner day and AWS Summit. In this post I’ll summarise how it all went and some of the impressions I had.

AEM/Opinion

AEM 6.3: First Impressions

April 28, 2017 Michael Leroy 9 Comments

Adobe Experience Manager’s latest release became generally available on the 26th of April 2017 and being Adobe Partners we got the opportunity to try it out hot off the press. It’s a minor release but introduces some new key features that go a long way to make Adobe Experience Manager a more enjoyable product to use. Not only from an authoring standpoint but also for developers. Here’s some of the great things about 6.3 as well as the “not so great”.

Big Data/Cloud/databases/Opinion

Whispers from the other side of the globe with BigQuery

April 18, 2017 Aaron Brown 1 Comment

Setting the scene

A couple of months ago my colleague Graham Polley wrote about how we got started analysing 8+ years worth of of WSPR (pronounced ‘whisper’) data. What is WSPR? WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, is signal reporting network setup by radio amateurs for monitoring the ability for radio signals to get from one place to another. Why would I care? I’m a geek and I like data. More specifically the things it can tell us about seemingly complex processes. I’m also a radio amateur, and enjoy the technical aspects of communicating around the globe with equipment I’ve built myself.

Homer simpson at Radio transceiver — Homer Simpson as a radio Amateur

AEM/Opinion

Adobe Innovation Session: Customer Journey Management

February 16, 2017February 16, 2017 Michael Leroy Leave a comment

As part of the Adobe Partner program, various sessions and events are organized to keep partners updated on the latest features of the Adobe Marketing Cloud platform. Best practices are also talked about in order to deliver high quality solutions to clients that invest in Adobe’s digital experience management solutions.

On February 15th, Shine Solutions was invited to an Adobe Innovation Session with a focus on managing the Customer Journey in a cross-channel marketing environment. This is a summary of what we heard that day.

Opinion/Services/UI/UX Design/Web

My Big Fat UX Wedding

February 15, 2017February 15, 2017 Mario Quintana 1 Comment

Or how to keep Groomzilla away

As a UX designer with a background in Law and Visual Communication, I have been solving problems for a while. Yet, little could prepare me for solving a challenge of a different kind: my very own wedding.

Well, that is what I thought.

My partner is from South Africa. I am Spanish. We met in Dublin, then moved to Melbourne and eventually decided to get married in my hometown in the Canary Islands.

The ‘problemo’? Organise an enjoyable multicultural wedding 10,000km away, without breaking the bank or losing my cool.

News/Opinion

TEL highlights for 2016

December 21, 2016February 22, 2017 Shine Solutions Group Leave a comment

Shine’s Technical Excellence Leadership Group (TEL) has had a stellar year! In this post we’ve pulled together our top picks from 2016 that we think deserve a special shout out before the year comes to a close. But first, a quick recap on what the TEL group actually is.

TEL 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. TEL is allocated a yearly budget from the super-duper generous Shine directors, and the members of the TEL group are put in charge of overseeing how it is spent.

The budget comprises two parts: money and time. The monetary portion of the budget goes to prizes and bonuses for producing material. The time portion is for staff to draw upon to get away from their day-to-day work commitments and to produce their material. So, now that you know what TEL is all about, let’s have a look at the highlight reel from 2016 shall we?

Node.js/Opinion/Tools/Web

A Framework for Better Emails

November 7, 2016 Chris Rzepa 1 Comment

Creating rich email templates can be a real pain, not only having to discard many best practices when it comes to writing HTML and CSS, but also needing to ensure your email renders correctly in all the commonly used email clients, many of which will throw away or ignore large portions of your carefully crafted styling.

iPhone/Java/Javascript/Opinion/UI/Web

YOW! Connected 2016: The typed-functional future of UI platforms

October 10, 2016October 11, 2016 Ben Teese Leave a comment

I just spent a couple of days at the YOW! Connected conference and had a great time, despite nursing a bit of a cold. There were a tonne of great talks at the conference covering a wide range of topics, but in this post I’m going to briefly reflect on one specific trend that interested me at the event: the way in which UI platforms are advancing to adopt modern languages, and are even influencing each other in the process. The end-result: they’re all moving towards languages that are both functional and statically typed.

Full disclosure: This year I was a member of the programme committee for the conference. So in writing this post, there’s a bit of a risk that I’m creating an echo chamber for myself. All I can really say in my defence is that I hadn’t consciously made these connections in advance – it was only afterwards that I saw a trend!

Big Data/Cloud/databases/IaaS/Opinion/Services

Google BigQuery hits the gym and beefs up!

August 19, 2016August 20, 2016 Graham Polley 2 Comments

At Shine we’re big fans of Google BigQuery, which is their flagship big data processing SaaS. Load in your data of any size, write some SQL, and smash through datasets in mere seconds. We love it. It’s the one true zero-ops model that we’re aware of for grinding through big data without the headache of worrying about any infrastructure. It also scales to petabytes. Although we’ve only got terabytes, but you’ve got to start somewhere right?

If you haven’t yet been introduced to the wonderful world of BigQuery, then I suggest you take some time right after this reading this post to go and check it out. Your first 1TB is free anyway. Bargain!

Anyway, back to the point of this post. There have been a lot of updates to BigQuery in recent months, both internally and via features, and I wanted to capture them all in a concise blog post. I won’t go into great detail on each of them, but rather give a quick summary of each, which will hopefully give readers a good overview of what’s been happening with the big Q lately. I’ve pulled together a lot of this stuff from various Google blog posts, videos, and announcements at GCP Next 2016 etc.