Stripe offer a set of APIs which allow businesses and individuals to easily accept and manage payments online. In a typical scenario you want your users to pay for a service that you’re offering using Stripe as a mediator. On the other hand, Angular is gathering more and more popularity…

See you later I’m going to be away from the grid (web, twitter etc.) for a few weeks…

Welcome to part four in my series about Serverless…

UPDATE: This method no longer works on MacOS Sierra (10.12). I’ll post again when I find a new method. I’ve been a Mac user on and off for over twenty years, but never really used one for serious work outside of basic web dev until quite recently…

IT WAS A BUSY WEEK FOR ECONOMIC AND HOUSING DATA. Existing and new home sales came out, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University released their annual State of the Nation’s Housing, and the U.K. voted to leave the European Union (the Brexit)…

Progressive Web Applications help us build native-like web apps, thanks to amazing tools such as Service Workers, IndexDB, App Shell etc…

In this post, I will share the highlights of my analysis to see how we can compress the dataset while keeping all the data in one place including the fitted models . At the end, I will also attach a Shiny App for further interactive exploration…

Data visualization is a means of visual communication that should help people understand the significance of data easily and see interesting trends, patterns, distributions,..etc. If your audience fails to grasp the message that was intended to be conveyed by the graph, they are not to be blamed…

IN THIS POST WE’RE GOING to make an animated version of the famous Federal Reserve dot plot comparing the dots in March 2016 to June 2016…

Eli is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He joined in 2014 and currently develops on Google Cloud Platform’s machine learning and big data offerings, Tensorflow in particular…

R in Insurance, July 2016 I was a last minute stand in for a colleague and had to pull this together really quickly…

Eric Anderson is a product manager on Dataflow, a stream and batch data processing service. Before Dataflow, he started a growth analytics team in Google Cloud. Previously he worked at AWS and GE. Eric holds an engineering degree from the University of Utah and MBA from Harvard…

Office 365 is widely used between many customers…

A dataviz remix I came across some interesting analysis from Josh Lehner at the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis about the “Housing Trilemma”…

IN THIS POST I wanted to share a few data visualizations I made using the American Housing Survey (AHS). For this exercise I used the metro summary tables which you can download from American Fact Finder…

I’m a big consumer of podcasts. Ever since I started living on my own while in graduate school I’ve found that having funny and interesting people in my ears helps me get through the day…

A while back Energenie released a Raspberry Pi based remote controller for their line of remote controlled plug sockets. I ordered mine as soon as they came out but I quickly got bored with controlling my lamps through the command line, so I hacked up a quick web UI…

This is part three in my series about creating serverless systems using AWS API Gateway + Lambda via the Serverless project. If you’re haven’t already you can read part I and part II…

What comes first: the problems, or the tools to solve them? It seems at times as if the newest technology on the block has become more important than creating actual solutions to healthcare problems. In the digital health landscape, hackathons have run counter to the tools-first…

He’s remained a PM on GCE, helping to guide and build the service into a GA product which has seen exponential growth every year since going…

IN THIS POST I WANT TO PROVIDE some additional examples of using tweenr and gganimate to create nice smooth transitions in an animated GIF. In this post we’ll look at an animated waterfall chart. For this data I’m going to use the National Income and Products Accounts from the U.S…

RECENTLY I HAVE MADE several animated GIFs, primarily using the animation package. These gifs usually work pretty well, coming out something like this (code here)…

Well, it’s finally done. Eight years after I started this crazy graduate school journey I’ve successfully defended my dissertation. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t perfect, but it’s done and I couldn’t be happier to have accomplished this milestone. Some folks have asked to see the slides, so I thought I’d share them here…

He works with unikernels experimentally and is very interested in their application to platforms of the future…

EARLIER THIS WEEK THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU released data on population and housing units for counties across the U.S. in 2015. These data reveal important trends in population growth, and help shed light on recent house price trends…

For the last a couple of months I’m working on an Angular 2 based PWA. The more complex the application gets, the more I appreciate that our choice was Angular! For routing we’re using the initial Angular 2 router that is now deprecated…

“I haven’t been exercising as much this month.” I’d failed at inspiring yet another patient to be more active. She was a middle aged women working two jobs to help support her family. What next? Do I recommend a wearable? The choices we make everyday impact our health. Individual behaviors can lead to significant disease states including high cholesterol, obesity, and…

YESTERDAY THE FEDERAL RESERVE RELEASED minutes from their last Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in April. The big news was that the FOMC still considered a June rate hike a possibility. How much does Fed policy impact mortgage rates? I put together a few gifs comparing the history of the 30-year mortgage rate, the Fed Funds rate and the 10-year constant maturity Treasury…

As it often happens, everything begins with a call from a customer with a problem. The problem is related to WiFi roaming in a warehouse with clients disconnecting from RDP sessions. The clients are industrial PCs installed on forklifts that move quite fast (and dangerously)…

Learn how an incredibly popular mobile game can scale and provide social features, analytics, while keeping high throughput that enables low…

Another mortgage rates animated gif IN THE PAST I’ve told you how I made my mortgage rates gif…

Introduction IN THIS POST we’ll collect several visualizations of house prices I’ve shared on Twitter the past few days and have a little discussion. In prior posts I’ve also included code for some of these graphs, and the others are mostly straightforward extensions of the earlier examples…

Andrew has worked on Go at Google since almost the beginning, and has written tons of blog posts and talks on Go. He spends most of his time making Go easier to use. Chris joined the Go and Cloud teams last year to improve the experience of writing Go applications for Google Cloud Platform…

IN THIS POST I’m going to describe how to make some additional data visualizations of house prices and discuss a bit about what they…

Overcoming the Literacy Burden Using Voice-Mediated Interfaces The literacy and numeracy burden represents one of the major barriers to engaging patients in their health. Efforts to offer patients open access to their data afford those who are health literate an empowering opportunity. However, patients who struggle with literacy and numeracy may not…

THIS IS PART TWO of my series of meditations on house prices…

Terrance is a Technical Solutions Engineer working for Google Cloud Platform’s Support Team…

TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRENDS in house prices, I have a couple of data visualizations for the Freddie Mac house price index. Viz 1: House Price Dynamics The first compares the quarterly and annual appreciation for house prices across the 50 states plus the District of Columbia…

Following up from my last post about serverless systems, let’s do a walk-through of the Serverless project. Getting started As usual I’ll demo this using a Docker container. You can check out the code on Github and follow along: https://github.com/brianz/serverless-demo. This Docker image has Serverless v0.5.5…and that’s about it…

I finally got around to putting together an annotated chartbook, Tufte style, using the Tufte package for Rmarkdown…

EARLIER THIS WEEK the Census Bureau released the latest Housing Vacancy Survey (HVS) data for the first quarter of 2016. Much attention went to the homeownership rate estimates, which showed a decline in homeownership rates near a 48-year low…

Andy Oxfeld manages the engineering department at Humble Bundle. He’s been with the company for four years and worked on almost every part of our codebase at some point. Prior to being at Humble Bundle, he worked at Electronic Arts for four years on games such as Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Kubernetes 1…

THIS WAS A BUSY WEEK for housing data. On Monday, the NAHB released the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), which tracks home builder sentiment. On Tuesday we got New Residential Construction from Census/HUD which gives us housing starts and permits…

$$ p{\theta}(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{z}) = p{\theta}(\mathbf{x} | \mathbf{z}) p(\mathbf{z}). $$ In a typical instance of the variational autoencoder, we have only a single layer of latent variables with a Normal prior distribution, $$ p(\mathbf{z}) = \mathcal{N}(\mathbf{0},…

Key features: Start the Hugo server from your website root folder: Assuming you created a new website with the example content following the installation steps above, this section explores just a few more steps in order to customize it…

Rae is a product manager at Google and looks after IAM (Identity and Access Management) on GCP. She has been at Google for 3 years and is based in the Seattle office…

It’s a pretty exciting (and challenging) time to build software-based applications. Every week there are more and more tools to make our jobs easier or to enable us to focus on application development rather than dealing with the infrastructure around those applications…

The example site that you copied to create your site uses all the different types of widget (except talks), so you can generally just delete the widgets you don’t need and customize the parameters of the widgets you wish to keep…

To create a new publication: To create a project: To create a talk: So you would like to create a page which utilizes Academic’s widget system, similar to the…

A general image: A numbered figure with caption: I ❤️ Academic 😄 This is a…

This to the beginning: And this to the end: Example output: print(Sys.time()-strt) Time difference of 16…

A new data viz TODAY THE BLS released data on metro level wages, employment concentration and regional costs of living…

How do you use variables in Deployment…

If you’re a developer and don’t live under a rock you’ve undoubtedly heard of Docker. There are many many sites out there which will tell you about how to use Docker and how to start using it…this will not be one of those posts…

I’ve a confession to make. I’m a terrible blogger. I do so out of need and interest, and I’ve a lot of the latter but little of the former. “The game has changed.” Clu (Yes, Tron Returns. Get over it…

By default, LaTex tables are very tight: Adding this to the document preamble will add space between the rows: And this command can be used to add space between rows…

Common questions and answers will be listed here. Let’s consider the following LaTeX which fails to parse correctly: This is a side effect of Academic and Hugo attempting to parse TOML, Markdown and LaTeX content in the abstract…

In order to have better understanding of the following blog post you should be familiar with the fundamentals of the object-oriented and functional programming. I also strongly encourage you to explore the redux pattern. A couple of months ago I started working on the first version of a Silicon Valley-based startup…

As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I had been wanting to start a technical blog for some time. Mainly a a way of capturing things I learn or discover so that it can benefit others…

Justin is a Product Manager, web developer, and geek dad working on the developer experience for Google App Engine. He writes code, speaks at events, and rocks out on the ukulele. Before joining Google, he filled various developer and architect roles with startups, healthcare companies, and universities…

We’re going to make this chart (and talk about it) Wait, what is this? Let’s pause the animation and look at the last frame: This plot shows the distribution of metro area unemployment. These data are available here…

Late in 2014 we began the process of discussing a payment system at work. The system was to have a fairly simple reason for existing…to do all the work needed to charge credit cards on behalf of our customers. Backing up a bit…our system is mainly a B2B application…

Customer site, their security policy for WiFi is an SSID with a secret PSK: the IT manager type the password on my PC to allow me to access the network. Maybe he’s not aware of my keylogger or that the password con be easily retrieved in cleartext. Let’s see how…

The talks are organized in the following playlists: Mike discusses how people migrate to Google Cloud Platform and how they evolve once on it…

EARLIER THIS WEEK the U.S. Census Bureau released updated population figures for 2015. These data revealed changes in population across the country. Jed Kolko published a nice summary of these data, and it got me thinking about the relationship of population growth rates and house prices…

The Cyberspace a.k.a…

Maintaining the angular-seed, I found out that the most common problem for developers using the project is: Duplicate identifier 'export='. (2300) compilation error…

For the blog readers, just a quick heads up that I have posted a new R data animation to YouTube. A complete post will follow, but for now here is the video. It displays the social network of SNAP Shiny app users over about the past year and a half using great circle trajectories on a rotating 3D Earth…

Tight Inventory EARLIER THIS WEEK, Trulia published a post by Chief Economist Ralph McLaughlin called “House Arrest: How Low Inventory Is Slowing Home Buying”. The article analyzed trends in housing inventory…

Now, this makes sense. Some sources of irreproducibility include, but are not limited to: The other measures they used in this paper are also very nice, in plotting the median correlation of a sample against all other samples, and the fraction of outlier features in a given sample (see figure 2 of Gierlinkski et al)…

Ian is a Developer Advocate on the Google Cloud Platform team working out of Tokyo. Ian loves Python and Go and helps run the largest Python event in Japan, PyCon JP. Ian is also interested in Docker and Kubernetes and hopes to help Google Cloud Platform users achieve their highest potential…

SAAS Application Architecture I was finally inspired to get this site up and running after listening to a Software Engineering Radio podcast with John Sonmez. In that podcast episode John talks about how a technical blog can really help your career..…

My minimal…

Mid-week chart update With existing home sales, house prices, and new home sales being released, this is one of the busiest weeks of the month for housing data. We’ll catch new home sales tomorrow morning, but let’s catch our breath and recap what we’ve learned so far this week…

It’s been a very very long time since I’ve posted anything publicly. Blogging has drastically changed since the early days. As most of you, I consume a lot of material and resources on the internet. For a while I’ve wanted to contribute back…I’m constantly learning new things and some of them are really useful…

The need If you work with Linux machines and you don’t use a terminal multiplexer you’re doing it wrong. What is a terminal multiplexer? It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal…

Installing your first spark cluster So, if you’re like me you’ve been using a lot of traditional tools for data science/analytics/whatever you want to call it. R is great, it’s flexible, it’s powerful but it’s slow and memory constrained. At work I’ve got a VM with 16Gb and one call can increase it…

This past week I tracked several data releases that give us an idea of the health and vibrancy of the economy and housing markets. State employment trends positive Consistent with the national employment numbers state employment trends are positive…

updated 2016-03-31 - few functions renamed updated 2016-10-07 - see updated tutorial for text2vec 0.4 Today I’m pleased to announce preview of the new version of text2vec. It is located in the 0…

DevOps engineer with a long history of system administration…

Linux scripting is a skill every network/system engineer should learn in the early stages of the career. Plenty of guides available in the interwebz, The Bash Academy is a good start…

The rOpenSci Unconferene is coming to Australia and we are excited!! I was completely and unceremoniously thrown into the deep end when I first started learning R. Contrary to what I initially thought possible, I am now irreversibly converted to the ideology of open…

Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software…

The Problem Notes, code and configuration snippets, links, screenshots… where/how to save them and allow and easy/fast way to tag/search them when needed? The Solution In my opinion the best software for notes is Onenote today…

It was my first time at the Melbourne Zoo, and my first time having a conference in a Zoo. It was a pretty surreal experience briskly walking to the conference room while trying to navigate a zoo, passing monkeys, macaws, and…

Resilient job growth SPRING IS ALMOST HERE, and housing market activity will start to accelerate as we enter the peak homebuying season in the spring and summer months. The latest jobs report shows the U.S…

Spotify is now on Google Cloud Platform:…

So far, most of the blog posts I’ve written are tutorials; they explain how we can use given technologies, architectures, algorithm etc. For instance: Flux in Depth…

{% include JB/setup National house prices rise 6.2% Freddie Mac released its full year 2015 house price index and an interactive data visualization. The seasonally-adjusted national index increased 6.2 percent year-over-year and is now 29.6 percent above the post-recession low, and just 4…

Paul currently focuses on helping developers harness the power of Google Cloud Platform to solve their big data problems. Previously, he was an engineer on Google Cloud Storage…

NottinghamR, Feb 2016 Sarah Introduces the first NottinghamR User Group Meeting I volunteered to speak at the first ever meeting of the NottinghamR user group, organised by Sarah of Capital One’s Data Science…

Hi CLEUR! This year, for the fourth year in a row, I’ve attended Cisco Live Europe. I’ve earned the “Netvet” status, that means my name was on the wall before the keynote, ain’t that great? ;-)

Aesthetics apart, this year’s event was the biggest I’ve attended so far, twelve thousands people in a huge venue (for European standards) and a lot of sessions available…

Disclaimer: originally I planned to write post about R functions/packages which allow to read data from hdfs (with benchmarks), but in the end it became more like an overview of SparkR capabilities…

About two weeks ago I published the initial draft of a Community-driven Angular 2 Style Guide. It was based on: Patterns I noticed in the Angular 2 source code while contributing to the framework. Suggestions by Miško Hevery during his technical review of my book “Switching to Angular 2”…

Sara is a Developer Advocate on Google’s Cloud Platform team, where she helps with developer relations through online content, outreach and events. She has a bachelor’s degree in Business and International Studies from Brandeis University…

Ray is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform…

Jenny is a Developer Advocate on Cloud at Google. In this role she helps developers build cool stuff on all sorts of platforms. Previously she worked in a wide variety of software roles from robotics at NASA, to developer advocacy for Google Glass…

The problem In my last post about Linux at command I talked about notifications on my mobile…

With a good amount of surprise I’ve been nominated Cisco Champion for 2016: Because of your impactful and valuable contributions to the IT community, you have been chosen out of hundreds of nominees to be part of the 2016 Cisco Champion program…

Another post on Linux commands, short and simple but very useful: at. The problem As IT pros we are all comfortable with the change window concept. This window usually opens at night or during the week-end and sometimes the change actually just requires a few commands on a Linux machine…