Google Tag

Last week I had the privilege of attending Google Cloud Next in San Francisco. With Google finally due to open a datacenter in Australia this year, it was certain to be a great opportunity to learn about what's next with Google Cloud. From the moment I arrived at the baggage carousel at San Francisco International Airport, I was swamped with advertising for the conference. It was clear that Google is really pushing their cloud platform to as many developers as possible. This left me really excited for what was about to come over the following week. In this post I'm going to try and sum up how it all went.
14 March, 2017 /

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Beers + 'WSPR' = fun

To this day, I'm a firm believer in the benefits of simple, informative, and spontaneous conversations with my colleagues - at least with the ones who can stand me long enough to chat with me . Chewing the fat with other like minded folks over a beer or two is a bloody good thing. It's how ideas are born, knowledge is shared, and relationships are formed. It's an important aspect of any business that is sadly all too often overlooked.
18 January, 2017 /

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The decline of Stack Overflow?

A few months back I read this post from 2015 (yes, I know I'm a little late to the party) about how Stack Overflow (SO) was in serious decline, and heading for total and utter oblivion.  In the post, the first item to be called  out was that SO "hated new users":
Stack Overflow has always been a better-than-average resource for finding answers to programming questions. In particular, I have found a number of helpful answers to really obscure questions on the site, many of which helped me get past a road block either at work or in my hobby programming. As such, I decided I’d join the site to see if I could help out. Never before has a website given me a worse first impression.
At the time, I remember thinking that this seemed like somewhat of an unfair statement. That was mostly down to the fact that when I joined the community (many years ago), I had fond memories of a smooth on-boarding, and never experienced any snarky remarks on my initial questions. Yes, gaining traction for noobs is very, very hard, but there is a good reason why it exists. For me, SO is invaluable. How else would I be able to pretend to know what I'm doing? How else could I copy and paste code from some other person who's obviously a lot smarter than me, and take all the credit for it? Anyway, once I had read the post, and gotten on with my life (e.g. copying and pasting more code from SO), I did't think too much more about the post. Maybe I had just been lucky with my foray into the SO community? However, just last week, I was reminded of that post once again, when I noticed that BigQuery (BQ) now has a public dataset which includes all the data from SO - including user comments and answers. Do you see where I am going with this yet? If not, then don't worry. Neither did I when I started writing this.
20 December, 2016 /

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  Shine's very own Pablo Caif will be rocking the stage at the very first YOW! Data conference in Sydney. The conference will be running over two days (22-23 Sep) and is focused big data, analytics, and machine learning. Pablo will give his presentation on Google BigQuery,...

31 August, 2016 /

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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.
19 August, 2016 /

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[caption id="attachment_7618" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]c246283e-2952-41db-a64f-a8fb9f186c6c-original All the GDEs posing at the Googleplex[/caption] A few months back, Shine's Pablo Caif and Graham Polley were welcomed into the Google Developer Expert (GDE) program as a result of their recent work at Telstra. The projects they are working on consist of building bleeding edge big data solutions using tools like BigQuery and Cloud Dataflow on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can read all about that here. GDE acceptance comes with many benefits and privileges, one of which is a yearly trip to a private summit at a different location each year. With Google footing the bill, they bring all the GDEs (around 250 currently) from around the globe for, let's admit it, a complete Google geek-out fest for 2 days! This year the summit was at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Needless to say, Pablo and Graham were chomping at the bit to go. However, in addition to the summit, Google invited them to fly out prior to actual summit itself. They had lined up a few other things especially for the guys. So this was no ordinary trip. Lucky buggers! We asked both guys to give their individual feedback on the trip, and here's what they had to say about it. Read on if you want to hear about how the guys spent six days hanging out with Google in America.
07 December, 2015 /

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Bq_tOGxCMAELB4k Back in June 2014, at the annual Google IO in San Francisco, Google unveiled their newest, and much hyped cloud product, Cloud Dataflow. The demo they did that day, using a live twitter feed to analyze supporter sentiment during the 2014 world cup, got my mouth watering at the prospect of working with it. It looked downright freaking awesome, and I just couldn't wait to get my hands on it to take it for a spin.
25 February, 2015 /

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