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Erik Gfesser

📍 Greater Chicago Area

Personal Reading List: 1Q2018

My personal reading list for January, February, and March 2018. Color Key: Special Notes, Completed Reading. Updated throughout the Quarter. At Bat (Schnell) Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems, by Martin Kleppmann, O'Reilly, 2017. Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications: Getting Answers

New Book Review: "RabbitMQ in Depth"

New book review for RabbitMQ in Depth, by Gavin M. Roy, Manning Publications, 2018, reposted here: The bottom line: this book is one of the best organized, succinctly written technology texts I have ever run across, with a phenomenal mix of text, diagrams, and code. So if you are looking

What is Big Data? (November 6, 2014)

Quite recently, I overheard a project colleague of mine having a discussion with someone on the phone. Somewhat abruptly, he covered the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered a question to me: "Erik, are we doing big data on this project?" My short answer, without thinking too much

Media Query Source: Part 9 - InformationWeek (US digital magazine); Non-RDBMS emerges as an analytics data choice

* InformationWeek (US digital magazine) * Growing adoption of non-RDBMS for analytics * Further database product hybridization likely * Product selection due diligence important My responses ended up being included in an article at InformationWeek (October 31, 2017). Extent of verbatim quote highlighted in orange, paraphrased quote highlighted in gray. Above image from cited

New Book Review: "Future Legends"

New book review for Future Legends: Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets, by Janka Krings-Klebe, Joachim Heinz, and Jörg Schreiner, 2017, reposted here: Just recently, I read a post submitted to a professional forum that someone had written on the subject of agility and why agility is not really what organizations need

Google Phone Process Improvement

Last weekend, I spent some time at the Apple store in nearby Oak Brook. Several customers around the table at which I was standing (I was not a customer) were getting help with various iPad and iPhone issues, with one customer very openly upset that he had been asked by

Personal Reading List: 4Q2017

My personal reading list for October, November, and December 2017. Color Key: Special Notes, Completed Reading. Updated throughout the Quarter. At Bat (Schnell) Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications: Getting Answers Now from Data Sets that Never End, by Dean Wampler PhD, O'Reilly, 2016. Copy provided by O&

Media Query Source: Part 8 - CIO (US digital magazine); When to kill (and when to recover) a failed project

* CIO (US digital magazine) * Decision making for failing projects * Failure likely unless changes made * Failure not necessarily negative in itself My responses ended up being included in an article at CIO magazine (September 14, 2017). Extent of quote highlighted in orange. Above image from cited article. The responses I provided

Media Query Source: Part 7

The responses I provided to a media outlet on August 8, 2017: Media: How to Explain Microservices in Plain English. My responses addressed the more detailed questions as follows: Media: How do you define microservices succinctly? Gfesser: A microservice can be described as an independently running application that is responsible

New Book Review: "Pricing Done Right"

New book review for Pricing Done Right: The Pricing Framework Proven Successful by the World's Most Profitable Companies, by Tim J. Smith, Wiley (Bloomberg Press), 2016, reposted here: As the author (founder and CEO of Wiglaf Pricing) mentions at the outset, every offering of a given firm and