Interesting Stuff - Week 28

Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, and so forth, that has to do with things that interest me:

• data science
• data in general
• distributed computing
• SQL Server
• transactions (both db as well as non db)
• and other “stuff”

This blog-post is the “roundup” of the things that have been most interesting to me, for the week just ending.

.NET

• System.IO.Pipelines: High performance IO in .NET. A blog post which announces System.IO.Pipelines which is a new library that is designed to make it easier to do high performance IO in .NET. I wish it had been around when we wrote socket code, way back when.

Distributed Computing

• Evolution of Application Data Caching : From RAM to SSD. A blog post about Netflix and how they move from purely RAM based caches to a hybrid between RAM and SSD. Very, very interesting!
• Auto Scaling Production Services on Titus. This blog post, also from Netflix, discusses auto-scaling on their container management system Titus. It is interesting to read how the interaction happens between the AWS Auto Scaling engine and Titus.

Streaming

• Kafka 1.0 on HDInsight lights up real-time analytics scenarios. This Microsoft blog post discusses the advantages that Kafka 1.0 on Azure HDInsight provides for data scientists and data analysts.
• Install Confluent Platform (Kafka) on Windows. This post from yours truly discusses we can install Kafka, in the guise of Confluent Platform, on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Useful if you, like me, is a Windows dude (or dudette) and you want to run Kafka locally on your development box.

Data Science

• R 3.5.1 update now available. This post by David talks about the new version of R: 3.5.1.
• Announcing ML.NET 0.3. At Build 2018 Microsoft released ML.NET 0.1, a cross-platform, open source machine learning framework for .NET developers, and I posted about it in the week 19 roundup. A month or two later they released ML.NET 0.2 which I covered in the roundup for week 23. It is now time for ML.NET 0.3 with quite a few new enhancements. What interests me is to see what “cool” new features application developers dreams up with this.
• R for AI developers. So, David is at it again. This time he did a presentation at QCon.ai where he makes a case for R as a platform for developing models for intelligent applications. The presentation is a must-see!

~ Finally

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoy what I did put together. If you have ideas for what to cover, please comment on this post or ping me.

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