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The Reality Check for NI Startups : #northernireland #code #startups #nocode #fdi #outsourcing

The Reality Check for NI Startups : #northernireland #code #startups #nocode #fdi #outsourcing

Disclaimer: Everything here is an opinion, the facts (as usual in NI) are very hard to pin down. Comment, tell me I’m wrong, it’s all fine if it makes the NI tech/startup scene a better place. This is every startup in Northern Ireland looking for a coder to build their product right now. The odds of finding someone are really not that good. Don’t get hung up that it’s a Northern Ireland issue,…

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Time For A Change? #algorithms #ml #ai #business #data

Time For A Change? #algorithms #ml #ai #business #data

My first WordPress blog post was back in October 2008, my first blog post goes back way before then in 2000. Twenty-one years of knowledge, insight and, let’s be honest, nonsense. While most folk know me for the big data thing, whether that’s Hadoop, Spark, Kafka or Pulsar. What I want to do now is focus on the fun stuff again, the side projects that make me tick. So it’s really about data and…

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Apache Kafka vs Apache Pulsar #kafka #pulsar #streaming @digitalis_io

Apache Kafka vs Apache Pulsar #kafka #pulsar #streaming @digitalis_io

It’s been a long lockdown few months….. so not much posting. I did, however, write a comparison of Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar for my employer Digitalis. Enjoy! https://digitalis.io/blog/kafka/apache-kafka-vs-apache-pulsar/

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Tales from the Frontline of Kafka - #kafka #confluent #podcast

Tales from the Frontline of Kafka – #kafka #confluent #podcast

Listen now >>>>> https://developer.confluent.io/podcast/tales-from-the-frontline-of-apache-kafka-devops-ft-jason-bell The podcast has been up a while now but I’ve been busy. It was definitely fun to do. There’s a lot of opinion especially about how teams, developers and others embrace Kafka. We also confirmed that Dave Klein is not omnipresent, I was convinced that he was.

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Kafka Is A Team Sport Redux - #kafka #apachekafka #streamingdata #data #confluentkafka

Kafka Is A Team Sport Redux – #kafka #apachekafka #streamingdata #data #confluentkafka

The feedback from Saturday’s blog post Kafka Is A Team Sport was very positive. I still felt I hadn’t quite got my point across though, well not clearly enough. Then it hit me.

The Three Functions

I see the current ecosystem as three distinct parts. Development, DevOps Engineering and Data Engineering. They all have different functions and, in my eyes, operate differently.

Excuse the Apple…

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Kafka Is A Team Sport - #kafka #apachekafka #streamingdata #data #confluentkafka

Kafka Is A Team Sport – #kafka #apachekafka #streamingdata #data #confluentkafka

One of the nice things about being an early adopter is watching things grow. Another is observing how that adoption happens from organisation to organisation. The questions I get tend to be varied and in the oddest of locations, doing an impromptu Q&A at London City Airport is still a highlight of data related daftness.

The last few weeks have been all about Kafka, well it ismy job, and it’s…

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Tesco Clubcard: #customerloyalty is dead! It's all about membership! #clubcard #tesco #loyalty #data #datamining #algorithms

Tesco Clubcard: #customerloyalty is dead! It’s all about membership! #clubcard #tesco #loyalty #data #datamining #algorithms

(First things first, four months since my last post…. apologies, just a lot of things going on.)

The “rona” has done a lot of things to retail, it’s also done an awful lot of things to the economy. The UK furlough scheme reduced incomes and made customers very very very price sensitive. And today is the last day of the original furlough scheme as it stands, the next few months will be sadly…

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Selling API Access - Three Steps to Customer Success - #api #programming #software #business #data

Selling API Access – Three Steps to Customer Success – #api #programming #software #business #data

Application Programming Interfaces (API) are is a method for developers and website owners to connect their product to another product. For example, think about all the tools that use Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to get a customer’s data, developers will more than likely be using the respective API to connect and access the data.

I’ve used API’s in one way or another over my career, I’ve…

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Customer Loyalty - Starting a stampercard: Part 1. #customerloyalty #stampcard #coffee #tea #loyalty #retail #cafe #restaurants

Customer Loyalty – Starting a stampercard: Part 1. #customerloyalty #stampcard #coffee #tea #loyalty #retail #cafe #restaurants

Sometimes the simplest solutions work the best and the stamp card is the easiest way to establish a form of repeat business. The idea is simple, have a card with spaces for nine or ten transactions, where stamps or a pen signature can be applied. Once the card is complete the customer then receives a free item. The most common use is in cafes and coffee bars, the card rewards a free coffee (or…

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Dealing With Imposter Syndrome on Panels - #impostersyndrome #beltech2020 #ai #machinelearning #conferences

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome on Panels – #impostersyndrome #beltech2020 #ai #machinelearning #conferences

Thirty-two years into this industry and this was possibly the first time that imposter syndrome didn’t hit me five minutes before the start of the panel.

If you are doing a talk and it’s you and you alone, then that’s okay. You’ve put the work in, got the slides sorted, rehearsed(!) and when you stand on the platform or stage then you are in control (most of the time). A panel though is…

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Extending Topic Retention in Kafka - #kafka #apachekafka #confluent

Extending Topic Retention in Kafka – #kafka #apachekafka #confluent

There’s a part in my internal body clock that worries about Kafka messages, especially production Kafka messages, especially LOSING Kafka messages…. Even when I know that the retention policies work perfectly well and do as they are told I still wake up and worry. If you maintain a Kafka cluster then you’ll understand. When it comes to messages you will do anything to make sure they don’t vanish.

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Three Things Retailers Can Do Right Now - #COVID-19 #retail #ecommerce #startups #fashion #restaurants #fastfood #bricksandmortar

Three Things Retailers Can Do Right Now – #COVID-19 #retail #ecommerce #startups #fashion #restaurants #fastfood #bricksandmortar

Retailers are feeling the impact of COVID-19 as the landscape of how people move, interact and generally get on with day-to-day life. The ones I’ve been talking to have seen drastic falls in footfall and takings. As you can assume, they are naturally worried.

For the first time ever I managed to enter and exit and McDonald’s Drive-thru without another vehicle near me.

So the next few months are…

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The National Trust and the Travelling Salesperson - #TSP #Data #NationalTrust @NationalTrustNI #R #RLang

The National Trust and the Travelling Salesperson – #TSP #Data #NationalTrust @NationalTrustNI #R #RLang

I’ve not had to change much of my routine when it comes to self isolation, I work from home anyways. Saying that with all my speaking engagements cancelled (and rightly so) my brain needed something else to do…..

The Travelling Salesperson problem has fascinated me for years but I’ve never had the time to really sit down with it.

Welcome to TSP!

The Travelling Salesperson problem is this.

“Given…

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Machine Learning Hands On 2nd edition now available. #machinelearning #ai #java #kafka #clojure #weka #dl4j #spark #r

Machine Learning Hands On 2nd edition now available. #machinelearning #ai #java #kafka #clojure #weka #dl4j #spark #r

Towards the end of February the author copies of the second edition of my book, Machine Learning: Hands-on for developers and technical professionals landed on my desk. I’m very happy with the way it’s turned out.

I’ve spend the last few months resting, asides from the day job at Digitalis.io – the plan was to gradually ease myself back in at Strata Data Conference in London, sadly this is…

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So tell me about the 94.75%.... #startups #business #IgniteNI #Propel

So tell me about the 94.75%…. #startups #business #IgniteNI #Propel

I’ve been contacted by a few people who seem rather insistent I crawl out of my grumpy cave as I’m not really commenting on things and haven’t done for most of the year.

I took the bait…. I fell for it.

A Big Whacking Great Disclaimer…..

If you think this post is about me having a go at the 5.25% who made it to £15k and a desk, nah, it’s not happening. Good luck to y’all and all the best.

It…

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Machine Learning book update.... #ai #machinelearning #java #clojure #kafka #dl4j #weka #spark

Machine Learning book update…. #ai #machinelearning #java #clojure #kafka #dl4j #weka #spark

The first draft of the second edition is complete and a lot of the editing work is done. There are a couple of big changes….

SpringXD has now been replaced with Kafka and how to perform self training machine learning models (with Neural Networks, Linear Regression and Decision Trees).

The chapter on Spark got a rewrite to bring it up to date (oh and bye Scala….)

New chapters on math/stats and…

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A Little Gotcha in Luminus request in Layout Renders..... #clojure #webdev #luminus

A Little Gotcha in Luminus request in Layout Renders….. #clojure #webdev #luminus

It’s been a while since I looked at the Luminus web development framework for Clojure. I know some folk find it a bit too heavy but I really like it. There have been some changes in releases since I built DeskHoppa so I though I better leave it here incase someone else gets confused by it.

So, the basic page render used to look like this:

(layout/render "mytemplate.html")

Then you could pass in a…