Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Learn more about AlphaCode here.

Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up.

Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who built Wordle for his partner to help pass the time during the pandemic, then sold it to the NY Times for a sweet seven figures.

John Myers comes from a big military family. He was convinced he was going to be a pilot his whole life. When he was a junior in High School, he started doing C++ programing and he got hooked. After graduation, he got accepted to RPI in update New York, and started suiting computer science. He eventually joined the Air Force, and focused on information systems. Through an interesting turn of events, John got accepted to the NSA, while a good friend of his took his deployment spot to Iraq. This job launched him into the world of cyber security, which took him to Afghanistan doing engineering for the military. When he came back to the states, he jumped head first into the startup world. John is married, and just bought a fixer upper house with his wife. He is into exercise, likes to bike in the summer and ski in the winter. Mostly, he likes to do simple things and decompress with his friends and family.

Post acquisition of his first startup, John stared working on a bunch of projects, one of them requiring him to aggregate a large amount of data and anonymize it. This took a lot of work, and there wasn't anything out on the market that provided this type of functionality.

This is the creation story of Gretel.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://gretel.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-myers-98b07b7/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


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This is the first episode of a three-part UNAJUA series that explains how Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) work. Nigerian creator, scientist, and knowledge worker Justin Irabor presents the series. ‌‌On this podcast, Justin tackles the question, Why DAO? by offering reasons why anyone intent on building valuable things on the Web would do well to lean into the decentralised autonomous organisation trend. Now, the last five years have seen Justin go from being a content writer to working as a performance marketer, then on to becoming a director of growth at Eden Life, and eventually morphing into a full-stack web developer. When Justin isn't posting viral hot-takes on Twitter and writing widely-read think pieces, he works as a dev at the Serbian platform-as-a-service provider, TradeCore—where he's helping build next-generation banking and investment products. OP-ED: How African Digital Currency Innovation Found Roots in a Village by Michael Kimani for Kenyan Wallstreet (https://kenyanwallstreet.com/sarafu-community-governed-digital-currencies/) EDITORIAL DISCLAIMER: While the Celo Community Fund supports this UNAJUA Series, African Tech Roundup maintains complete editorial oversight. Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the African Tech Roundup or the presenting sponsor, Celo Community Fund. SUPPORT US: Value our work? Then, join our Patreon Community (https://www.africantechroundup.com/patreon/) and help the African Tech Roundup platform remain single-mindedly focused on serving Africa's tech and innovation ecosystem with robust independent insight and learning content.

Links from the show:

• Upgrade to Laravel 9 in less than 5 minutes with Shift, Tests, and CI. : laravel
• GitHub - jessarcher/zsh-artisan: Laravel artisan plugin for zsh to help you to run artisan from anywhere in the project tree, with auto-completion, and it can automatically open files created by artisan!
• Free Raspberry Pi Zero Kit
• Kinesis Advantage2 Ergonomic Keyboard | Kinesis Keyboards and Mice
• Live Shows — HARRY MACK
• Soap (TV series) - Wikipedia

This episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:

• hookrelay (https://phpa.me/hookrelay) from our friends at Honeybadger.io

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• John Congdon
• Tom Rideout

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You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French).

You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here.

You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website. 

You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website.

Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app.

Jim Fagan has had a long and winding road into the tech world. He grew up in New Jersey, and post school, started out in Finance. Slowly, through those roles, he drifted towards operations, and then eventually, towards technology. Personally, he loves to be outside, doing stuff that involves the water. He enjoys surfing, wakeboarding, skiing, you name it. Through his profession, he has travelled the world, and visited many amazing places, including spending 9 years in Hong Kong. He found great pleasure in learning the cultures - personal and business - and how to reach out across languages to make connections.

Jim found himself in an opportune position, to join a company and not only bring it back to life, but to take advantage of a massive global connectivity solution, providing managed network services for over 140 multi-national companies. The question he was hired to answer was - how do we combine infrastructure with software?

This is the pivot story of Global Cloud Exchange.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.globalcloudxchange.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-fagan-1691593/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations

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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database. 

Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request. 

Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches. 

The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or increase investments in a particular business. Analytics help with overall strategy, which tends to be more far-reaching and effective. 

For most of its life, Vertica has been an on-premises database managing a data warehouse. But with the ease of cloud storage, Vertica Accelerator is looking to give you a data lake as a service. If you’re unfamiliar, data lakes take the data warehouse concept—central storage for all your data—and remove limits. You can have “rivers” of data flowing into your stores; if you go from a terabyte to a petabyte overnight, your cloud provider will handle it for you. 

Vertica has worked with plenty of industries that push massive amounts of data: healthcare, aviation, online games. They’ve built a lot of functionality into the database itself to speed up all manner of applications. One of their prospective customers had a machine learning model with thousands of lines of code that was reduced to about ten lines because so much was being done in the database itself. 

In the future, Vertica plans to offer more powerful management of data warehouses and lakes, including handling the metadata that comes with them. To learn more about Vertica’s analytics databases, check out our conversation or visit their website.