by Bryan Chuinkam | Sep 17, 2025 | Apache Spark Cafe
If you’re reading this, you’re probably curious about creating your first Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension. That was me not too long ago—comfortable with JavaScript, totally unsure how VS Code extensions actually run. It’s rewarding work, but the learning curve...
by Ian J. Ghent | Sep 3, 2025 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Marimo, Notebooks, Python
Enterprise Guide (EG) is the workhorse of SAS tools. Every day, thousands of citizen data scientists, analysts, data engineers and data scientists log-in and do much of their work from this tool. It was at the time (25+ years ago), one of the best designed tools for...
by Ian J. Ghent | May 2, 2024 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python
I recently attended a fantastic conference on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery put on by DRI Canada. The keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon was phenomenal. He founded the Cascade Institute, which studies crisis and the factors leading up to them. One key...
by Ian J. Ghent | May 10, 2023 | Apache Spark Cafe
Many people have heard of TD Bank Group’s attempted acquisition of First Horizon, and the subsequent collapse of that deal. With recent turmoil in the banking system, one might assume that the collapse of the deal had something to do with those developments. It would...
by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 11, 2023 | Apache Spark Cafe
I often like to think in the hypothetical, thought experiments if you will. What if, at this very moment SAS was hammering out the final details of a deal to sell itself to Oracle. This might seem a far fetched notion to some, but I assure you that it is not only in...
by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 2, 2023 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, SAS
Back in 2015, when my colleagues and I first started reading about and experimenting with Apache Spark and PySpark, we knew there was something special brewing in open analytics. Being in the data and analytics world since 1997, I’ve seen lots of trends come and go....
