Data Driven

In this Data Point, Frank and Andy talk about reinforcement learning, Mario Brothers, and then get sidetracked. Then Joel Cochran stops by and they really get sidetracked.

In this episode, Frank and Andy talk with Rie Irish about her path from sociology to database administration, women in technology, and getting people to walk around in circles.

We love experimenting around here and examining the resulting data. After all, we are Data Driven: not just in name but also in spirit. In this webinar Andy recorded, he also streamed it live on our Facebook page. We thought it was good enough to share with our larger audience here. Let us know what you think. Both Frank and Andy have been recording/streaming their live events and we’re curious to hear what you have to say about this innovation in how we podcast.

Andy is at SQL Saturday Boston and he runs into another Andy from SentryOne.

Today, Frank was in Philadelphia presenting a session at AI Discovery Day on Computer Vision Cognitive Services. The labs for this session are on GitHub: https://github.com/Azure/LearnAI-Bootcamp/tree/master/lab01.1-computer_vision These events will be taking place across the US. Here are a few dates and links to registration. City Date Title Link Boston, MA 9/28/2018 AI Discovery Day Registration Link Boston, MA 10/16/2018 AI Discovery Day Registration Link Malvern, PA 10/17/2018 AI Discovery Day Registration Link Reston, VA 10/25/2018 AI Discovery Day Registration Link Boston, MA 10/25/2018 WORKSHOP: Applied AI – Cognitive Services Registration Link

Hurricane #Florence has been making its presence known on the eastern shores of the mid-Atlantic region since the wee hours of this morning (13 Sep 2018). In Farmville, Andy is seeing weather that is being pushed by the storm – not the storm itself. Update: Andy blogged about the @AndyWeather weather station and how he uses IoT technology to tweet weather data and display it at AndyWeather.com. In other news, this is Episode #150 and we hit 70,000 downloads earlier today. Thank you listeners! Thank you guests! Yall rock!

In this DataPoint, Andy shares plans to capture weather data from Hurricane Florence for a site he maintains – named AndyWeather – and a Twitter account named @AndyWeather.

In this episode, Frank and Andy chat with Stu Ainsworth about service reliability in a chaotic world. Links Sponsor: Audible.com – Get a free audio book when you sign up for a free trial! Notable Quotes Postmortem: VSTS 4 September 2018 ([02:00]) Stuart Ainsworth on Twitter: @CodeGumbo ([05:30]) Reliability: Expectations vs. Solutions ([06:00]) “Canada is another country.” ([11:00]) “Serendipitous” ([11:55]) TV references: MacGyver and The A-Team ([13:40]) Chaos Monkey ([00:00]) Brent‘s book review of Database Reliability Engineering ([15:00]) Andy cannot count 9’s… ([19:15]) The shifting node for “big data.” ([23:30]) Service Level Objective ([25:00]) The Black Swan (Audible) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) ([28:00]) Frank’s 9/11 Experience ([30:00]) Culture is prime. ([35:00]) The hard part is figuring out, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” ([35:45]) DTU ([36:50]) Things are changing. Some folks are threatened ([40:30]) Stu works for Jack Henry. ([41:40]) Risk cannot be removed by technology. ([43:30]) “… it’s kinda like an old girlfriend…” – Stuart Ainsworth ([44:30]) Road trips! ([47:30]) “We are living in interesting times.” ([49:00]) Hoschton, Georgia ([50:25]) Stu likes the book Accelerate ([52:40]) Find out more about Stu at CodeGumbo.com! ([53:45]) Learn more about Azure DataFest by following @AzureDataFest on Twitter! ([54:00])

On Friday, the first ever Azure AI Fest was held in Reston, VA.  Data Driven streamed the keynote presentation live and was a sponsor. So, enjoy the audio of the keynote address by Ashish Jaiman, a former colleague and manager, who now works in the Democracy and Cybersecurity team at Microsoft. If you prefer to watch the event, including some of our special effects laden pre-roll, then click on the play icon below. Jump to the ten minute mark to see the event.

In this episode, Frank and Andy talk to Jake Mannix, an accomplished data engineer who has had an amazing career. Links Sponsor: Audible.com – Get a free audio book when you sign up for a free trial! Notable Quotes Frank heartily recommends Head Strong ([00:50]) It takes a lot of time to fly from Farmville to India… ([2:40]) Audible is a sponsor! ([04:00]) Jake is a Chief Data Engineer for LucidWorks ([06:15]) Jake describes a cool Systems Development Cycle… ([10:00]) … and compares and contrasts with Customer Service and Product Engineering. ([12:00]) Sometimes this cycle works “too good!” ([13:10]) Learn more about Lucene. ([15:00]) We now search by typing questions. Not terms. ([15:40]) More about Query-Intent Classification… ([17:10]) “How Do I Do Brain Surgery” – Google Search ([18:25]) Smart search is based on closed loop analysis of “who clicks on what.” ([19:30]) One example of public search datasets: Google Trends. ([21:30]) What is a garage-door opener? ([22:00]) “We expect a lot from search these days.” ([26:10]) Searching Amazon for garage door. ([26:40]) “Data is their foundation.” ([28:00]) “I’m a data engineer.” ([31:00]) “Math is fun but it’s 5% of the work.” What is most of the work? Data cleansing. ([31:20]) On tensors… ([31:40]) Jake likes to run long distances over mountains! ([33:10]) Jake thinks self-driving cars will be cool. ([37:30]) Jake shares his encounter with the Moonies, which wins the Something Different About Yourself segment (to date). ([39:35]) Jake and his daughter like to listen to audio books. ([43:20]) Learn more about Jake on LinkedIn! ([44:00]) Jak helped build LinkedIn‘s search engine! ([44:44]) Check out the LucidWorks blog. ([45:00])