Data science approach to organizing my playlist

A couple of years ago I created a Spotify’s playlist where I add all tracks I liked, just as the main repository of things I’d like to listen to, no matter the mood I was when I added that song. As time goes, this playlist became less enjoyable to listen due to the change in rhythm - From listen to a Metal song it jumps to Bossa Nova, which is very annoying. This post contains a few data science approaches I applied to organize this playlist and what worked and what didn’t.

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Setting up Macbook Pro for Development

As I’m building a new startup I’ve been installing several Macbooks and helping engineers on their own setup, of course, we all have our kinks on configuring our machines but there is a base that would be nice to share and keep as standard as possible. Those are my (hopefully sane) defaults.

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Should a backend developer learn Javascript?

I’ve been working with static-typed languages for several years now, C# / Java / Scala developer and I like the safety and guarantees of having type checking, also the whole JVM ecosystem aged well with great building tools, libraries and lots of experience from the community. But I cannot ignore all the buzz around Javascript and I don’t want to be prejudiced about something I didn’t work directly for several years.

This is a very overdue blog post that I had on draft for almost an year, but I believe it is still very relevant yet.

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A data science toolkit inside a docker image, build it once, run everywhere

If you never heard about Jupyter Notebook, I highly recommend you to check it out. It have been my primary platform to build reports and data driven case studies. On this post I’d like to show how I create a simple and isolated environment with a Bash script and Docker to run JupyterLab. Recently Jupyter Notebook received a major overhauling and become JupyterLab - currently in beta, but the new platform looks fresh and very powerful. Continue Reading »

Reasons to fall in love for Postgres

I’ve been working on analytics/big data field for 10+ years, during this time I’ve been working mostly with MySQL, MongoDB, Redis and Cassandra. Just a couple of years ago I started to really pay attention to Postgres, and my regret is not getting into it earlier… On this post I try to enumerate a few features I’m using and why I think you should try it too, before jumping into the architectural and operational complexity of multiple NoSQL. Continue Reading »