🔗 About the Blog
This Blog focuses on genuine news about the data ecosystem. Topics covered mostly are: #dataengineering #bigdata #python #opensource #ETL. But I’m also writing about #productivity #everydaylife and others.
👨💻 About the Author
This Blog page is maintained by me, Simon Späti 👋. I’m a dedicated, empathetic, entrepreneurial data engineer with more than 15+ years of experience. I enjoy maintaining awareness of new innovative and emerging open-source technologies on this blog.
📖 What I’m doing now
(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)
Blogging
After I started writing nearly a year ago, I finally finished my latest blog post about Building a Data Engineering Project in 20 Minutes. The post mainly sets the data engineering approaches explained earlier in action with a real-life example. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, as it contains an entire data engineering project with almost all my favourite open-source tools. For sure, I will also add some more tool when I have some time.
Clojure and Functional Programming
On the other side, I’m playing around with Clojure. Lately, there has been a rise of many new programming languages. Interesting enough, their mostly all functional programming languages. That made me curious, also because functional programming is the way to go for data engineering. While doing so, I learnt a ton. I’m sure Clojure will not get mainstream in any means, but I already applied the concept to my language of choice, Python. There’s also a great videos I found that applies FP to Python or Clojure in a nutshell, in case you interested.
Website: Moving from WordPress to GoHugo
I moved my website here away from WordPress to GoHugo. GoHugo and its being is the new trend in websites building. Instead of dynamically rendering the website when users visit the website, Hugo renders it to static HTML. It’s called static site generation (SSG). SSG means your site can only contain static content, with no interactions from the users, which is fine for my blog as it’s all static. Moreover, I cut down 50’s of plugins on WordPress, which needed constant update and version compatibilities between them. And have now plain MarkDown Text. The advantage I can push changes quickly to git and update by simply running a deploy script, which is a copy of rendered HTML files up to my server with rsync.
I didn’t plan to move immediately. But as I was on the lookup for some text-based Blog, I just played around with GoHugo for a couple of hours. But I found myself already exporting all content from WordPress, finding a good Template and removing tons of boiler code which wasn’t needed any longer.
The finalisation took some more time, but it is crazy how much fun it is to design your website with GoHugo. The concepts with partials and the generating parts work like a breeze! For the full story, check out my write-up Saying Goodbye to WordPress, a Homecoming.
Reading / Audios
Lately, I’m listening to more podcasts than books. I enjoyed Tim Ferris Michael Phelps where he talks about the big depression he had after he stopped swimming and still struggle with it. I find this especially helpful to hear about during these difficult times. Another interesting one was Marc Randolph on Building Netflix and how it all started.
With my wife, we started listening to The 5 Love Languages. This is especially helpful in any relation with human beings around you and how you communicate with them. It says that you can show love to someone every day, but if you do so in the wrong language, let’s say in telling her/him directly, but she/he is more on appreciation with physical touch, it will never really get to her/him.
This update was April 5th, 2021.
