Introducing Myself: Big Data, Machine Learning, and Blockchain Technology

Who the Heck Am I, Anyway?

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Well, actually, I'm younger than 37, but that's beside the point. I've meant to start a technical blog for a while, and by now I'm overdue. I'm certainly not the seasoned expert sitting on a mountaintop contemplating the "Zen" of programming all day long in a glorified bathrobe, but I'm also no longer the entry-level good-for-nothing code monkey that I first entered the workforce as in 2008. I've worked for several companies (roughly 8, thanks to my recent ventures into consulting), been thrown into the midst of the corporate tech battlefield, and lived to fight another day. While I'm not an "old" wise man, I like to think that I've moved beyond being a simple beast of burden for corporations, and I've certainly earned respect and recognition from my peers and superiors. A quick browse through my LinkedIn profile will show my persistent interest in programming languages. It is just that trait that has given me the upper hand over my peers in quickly learning languages that have been gaining recent popularity, such as Scala and Elixir.

Consider me your strange woman (except I happen to be a man), lying in a pond, distributing swords for the taking. I aim to arm you with practical knowledge that can get you a little closer to being king among your peers. However, wisdom finds varying value depending on the mind which wields it. One post may be to you an Excalibur and another a rusty metal club, for what one person knows another his equal may not. Nevertheless, I invite you to stretch forth thy hand and take thy sword of chance, that with it, thou mayest slay thy foes by its edge (or at least mercilessly beat them with thy rusty, metal club).

What, Exactly, Is This Blog About?

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Ever since Cerner put me onto Hadoop development in mid-2014, I have made it my mission to hunt and explore the vast plains of the Hadoop platform. I've researched, experimented, and developed on the Hadoop tools and frameworks, tools like Solr, Hive, Spark, and Flume, until I'd tamed them to do my bidding. Armed with the self-study I had already done into functional programming via the Haskell language, I became almost immediately productive in Scala, which has become a core language in Hadoop. I've contributed to Hadoop projects for companies, some from their humble beginnings until their release to production. Hadoop is about distributed computing and machine learning (so-called Big Data and Cloud computing), an area where functional programming shines, and where I will humbly lead you.

All of this talk about machine learning and functional programming might sound intimidating, but take heart! This blog presumes that you do not have prior knowledge of these things. While some basic familiarity with programming fundamentals is needed, I intend that even most entry-level programmers with a year or so of experience will be able to join us in the journey. There is currently a lot of material out there for those wholly uninitiated with Hadoop, and so I will provide links to existing articles and gloss over the ground-level Hadoop basics. The content published online for breaking through the ground level and advancing towards intermediate competency, on the other hand, is thin. I will be filling in some of that massive gap with this blog.

We'll also delve into blockchain smart contract development together as I acquaint myself with the cryptocurrency space. Blockchain looks like the wave of the future, so it behooves us all as technical professionals to dig into it. In this area, I will start out by toying with Ethereum. Eventually, I'll move on to a more scalable and production-ready platform, such as Cardano, once one of the Ethereum "competitors" matures enough to start working on it.

If you are interested in learning about either of these topics, please dig into the posts on my blog and give me your opinions and feedback. Pay it forward and expand upon what I've written for posterity's sake. In tech, we are about building the future, after all.

Obligatory Code of Conduct Statement

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I will take no personal insult to any and all criticisms aimed at me. This blog is an act of putting myself out there, and I should be held accountable for the accuracy and credibility of the content I present. My most significant motivator for even creating this blog is the inevitability that people will take it upon themselves to teach me through correcting and criticizing my content. So, please, if you see something that's wrong, or hate my style, or are just having a bad day and need to take it out on someone, let me have it in the comments.

However, I plead and beg that you all remain civil and amiable towards EACH OTHER in the comments. Being rude to others who choose to comment on my posts is a good way to get yourself flagged for a critical review of your own.

Shout-Outs

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Some notable people and companies have helped me on my journey to becoming a competent programmer. I've omitted surnames for privacy reasons.

• My Ruby on Rails development team at Cerner. Especially Brent, Chris, Saurabh, Divi, PT, Brandon, and my architect, Mark, who was instrumental in getting me into Hadoop development.
• My IT Manager, Amee, for moving me into software development at Cerner from a troubleshooting role.
• My Hadoop development team at Cerner. Especially my manager, Neha, Jordan, Jacob, and my architect, Nate.
• Jeremy, my manager from DST Systems, who exemplified to me the power of having control over your mind.
• Jack, who took the time to explain concepts from Abstract Algebra and Category Theory to me.
• Kyle and Andrew, who both took the time to explain aspects of the Haskell type system to me.
• Apratim, for taking the time to review my work and share his knowledge of system automation and networking.
• Satish, for walking me through some of the details of machine learning and Greenplum DB.
• Seth, for reviewing my first scripts in Clojure and teaching me how simple Python code can be.
• The rest of my team at DST Systems, especially John, who was always available to listen to and support his engineers.
• My team at Oalva, Inc., for dropping me headlong into exclusive Hadoop development (precisely the challenge I needed, at the time).
• My current client, AMC Theatres, and my consulting company, Triple-I, for continuing to foster my career development.
• The community on the Typelevel/Cats Gitter channel, who have been incredibly gracious and helpful to me in explaining topics relative to the Cats Scala library.
• Everyone who has agreed to review my posts, here, before publication.
• My priests and spiritual fathers who continue to guide me in the acquisition of Peace and taming of the mind.