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Erik Gfesser

📍 Greater Chicago Area

New Book Review: "Python Programming for Beginners"

New book review for Python Programming for Beginners: A Kid's Guide to Coding Fundamentals, by Patricia Foster, Rockridge Press, 2020: Copy provided by Amazon. In her one-page "How to Use this Book" introduction, Foster states that "this book will teach you the basics of Python

Personal Reading List: 2Q2021

My personal reading list for April, May, and June 2021. Color Key: Special Notes, Completed Reading. Updated throughout the Quarter. At Bat (Schnell) The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, by Michael D. Watkins, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. Copy provided by Deloitte.

Media Query Source: Part 33 - TechTarget (US digital magazine); Hadoop vs Spark: An an-depth big data framework comparison

* TechTarget (US digital magazine) * Apache Hadoop & Apache Spark * Overlap can exist between installations * Performance & use cases My responses ended up being included in an article at TechTarget (May 7, 2021). Extent of verbatim quote highlighted in orange, paraphrased quote highlighted in gray. Above image from cited article. The

Community Comment: Part 8

The comments I provided in reaction to a community discussion thread: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6764517635876040704?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6764517635876040704%2C6766303415871041537%29 Head of Experimentation at Social Media Platform: We should re-title “data cleaning” as “understanding the data”. Why? 1. It’s

New Book Review: "Learning Spark (Second Edition)"

New book review for Learning Spark (Second Edition), by Jules S. Damji, Brooke Wenig, Tathagata Das, and Denny Lee, O'Reilly, 2020, reposted here: Copy provided by Databricks at Spark + AI Summit 2020. The foreword and preface to this book comment that an update to the first edition, published

Media Query Source: Part 32 - TechTarget (US digital magazine); Do you need a data warehouse for business intelligence?

* TechTarget (US digital magazine) * Business intelligence & data warehouses * Usage of public cloud versus on premises * Cost is only one factor to consider My responses ended up being included in an article at TechTarget (February 12, 2021) entitled "Do you need a data warehouse for business intelligence?". Above

Community Comment: Part 7

The comments I provided in reaction to a community discussion thread: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6739765048434135041?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6739765048434135041%2C6746484892428754944%29 Managing Director at Educational Institution: Companies are trying to make the decision between building their next-generation pub/sub systems on

Community Comment: Part 6

The comments I provided in reaction to a community discussion thread: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6747585009990852609?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6747585009990852609%2C6747641413837631488%29&replyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6747585009990852609%2C6748184339915292672%29 Senior Software Engineer (ex-Facebook, ex-Netflix): A lot of data engineers

New Book Review: "Coding Concepts for Kids"

New book review for Coding Concepts for Kids: Learn to Code without a Computer, by Randy Lynn, Rockridge Press, 2020, reposted here: Copy provided by Amazon. I'm in the midst of reviewing a few programming minded books targeted specifically at children at middle school (intermediate school, junior high

Mentoring a Data Engineering Team while Running

A top 10 (US) grocer client contacted SPR to help them with their data lake. While we typically implement such solutions from scratch for our clients, the non-US division of this client had already put a solution in place, and the US division with which we worked was dependent on