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....
by Luigi (Lou) Di Serio | Aug 16, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, SAS
Mental Illness and Obsolete Skills October 2019 was the beginning of a very difficult and dark period for me. In truth, the decline began like a slow-motion train wreck during Christmas of 2018, but the main crisis point and collapse was triggered in October 2019. In...
by Ian J. Ghent | Jul 25, 2022 | Apache Spark Cafe, Cloud Computing, Python, SAS
It seems like everything these days is only for rent. The way we consume movies, music, books, computing, even the features in our cars, have all moved to be subscription model services, not products you buy and own. Pay once, own forever has increasingly become pay...
by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 18, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Cloud Computing, Python, SAS
What an absurd title! A strange twist on the “working hard or hardly working” cliché, but read on and I promise it will all make sense. Here’s a tale of a court jester and his great invention. Long ago in a vast and complex kingdom, there lived a great king. The...
by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 1, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, R, SAS
Back in 2015, when we set out to build SPROCKET, the World’s only SAS modernization solution, one key design question plagued our thoughts. Scalable, simple, fast and open-source, it was obvious from the early days of Apache Spark that it was analytics platform...
by Ian J. Ghent | Jan 28, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, SAS
Not to date myself, but I’ve been using SAS for over 25 years. I’ve worked at banks like Capital One and Citibank, Telecom companies like Verizon and Bell Canada, government institutions like Statistics Canada, and the company behind the SAS language. In all my years...
