Blog — Jowanza Joseph

One Week with Logitech Pop

Earlier this week I ordered a Logitech Pop. I had a small use case where to pop would work great. We have a small lamp with a Phillips Hue bulb that we use when our daughter wakes up in the night. Typically, we use HomeKit to turn the light on and off, but HomeKit is so spotty as to be impossible to use and using the Hue app is cumbersome in a frantic run to get a crying baby. I learned about the Pop and figured I could have an extra button next to the light switch that we could just tap on our way in and out, easy enough.

Connected HomeJowanza JosephMay 7, 2017iot, connected home

Creating A Spark Server For Every Job With Livy

Livy provides an interesting way to use Spark as a RESTful service. In my opinion, this is not an ideal way to interact with Spark, however. There is just a tad too much overhead of language interoperability to make it worth it. For starters, sending strings of Scala code over the wire doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Apache Spark, Data EngineeringJowanza JosephApril 19, 2017Scala, Apache Spark

Announcement: I’m Writing A Book on Apache Spark

For the last year or so I’ve been blogging regularly about the Apache Spark platform. During that time, Spark has grown from something that people in data science and engineering have used to something that is almost ubiquitous. I’ve enjoyed working with the platform professionally, and even on a number of personal projects.

Apache SparkJowanza JosephApril 10, 2017Apache Spark, Announcements

Lutron Caseta Review

I’ve been into this home automation thing for some time now. Any device on the market, I’ve most likely tried it already and there is an equally good chance that there is one functioning in my house. Most of the home automation products available for the mass market are still pretty user-hostile and ever so expensive.

Connected HomeJowanza JosephApril 2, 2017Home Automation, Lutron, Siri, Amazon Echo

A Gentle Intro To Graph Analytics With GraphFrames

GraphFrames allow us to do exactly this. It’s an API for doing Graph Analytics on Spark DataFrames. This way, we can try to recreate SQL queries in Graphs and have a better grasp of the graph concepts. Not having to load the data and create the relationships makes a lot of difference in a pedagogical context (At least I’ve found).

Apache Spark, Data EngineeringJowanza JosephApril 2, 2017Scala, Apache Spark, Graph Analytics, GraphX