The data layer doesn’t always get the top billing it deserves in app development circles. To shine a light on the databases that power today’s top apps, Compose is hosting its second annual DataLayer event on Wednesday, May 17 at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin.

To preview DataLayer, we’re joined by Thom Crowe (@ thomcrowe) from Compose, who shares a bit about what to expect at DataLayer – from a range of data services to the power of polyglot persistence. He also previews the keynote by Honeycomb’s Charity Majors, “Observability and the Glorious Future” (3:23).

Then, we’re joined by a DataLayer 2017 speaker, Meteor’s Jonas Helfer (@ helferjs), who previews his talk, “Joins Across Databases with GraphQL,” and shares a little about his work with Apollo and GraphQL (11:53).

Register for DataLayer today and enter promo code “IBM” at checkout to receive a discount on your ticket.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@ JW_Young) or email (jwyoung@us.ibm.com). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Ep. 33: Conquer Your Data Layer

It’s that time of year for the annual conversation between The New Builders and ODPi, the Linux Foundation project standardizing the big data ecosystem around Apache™ Hadoop®.

We met up with ODPi VP of Technology Roman Shoposhnik at ApacheCon 2017 in Miami, building on the interview we conducted last year with ODPi Director John Mertic in Vancouver.

Roman shares how he sets a fair technical agenda for ODPi as VP of Technology (5:30), ODPi’s moves toward tighter integration with ASF (7:55), why he thinks of ODPi as the “commercial yin” to the “open source yang” of the Apache™ Bigtop® project that he founded (11:25), and why IoT’s prominence today reminds him of Big Data a decade ago (13:10).

Register for the IBM Data Science Bootcamp at Spark Summit to learn the ins and outs of the open source PixieDust library and how it simplifies working in a Jupyter Notebook.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@ JW_Young) or email (jwyoung@us.ibm.com). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Ep. 34: Dispatch from ApacheCon in Miami

In David Taieb’s (@ DTAIEB55) view, the best line of code is the one you didn’t have to write. Hence the inspiration behind PixieDust, an open source helper library, built by Taieb and his team. PixieDust makes it easier for users of Jupyter Notebooks to start analyzing data quicker, without nearly as much coding, and simplifies data science for developers and business users.

David shares the origin story behind PixieDust and how he built it (5:20), PixieDust’s compatibility with the user’s preferred flavor of Jupyter, be it Apache Spark, Python or Scala (7:54), some of the other rendering engines (Mapbox, Bokeh, Matplotlib) that come built in (13:08), the companion project of HTML- and CSS-powered PixieApps (15:13), and PixieDust’s role in enabling businesses in the Middle East to make better data-driven decisions (18:58).

Register for the IBM Data Science Bootcamp at Spark Summit to learn the ins and outs of the open source PixieDust library and how it simplifies working in a Jupyter Notebook.

IBM Data Science Experience (DSX) is now available as part of the IBM Bluemix Catalog. See it in action with a free trial of DSX. 

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@ JW_Young) or email (jwyoung@us.ibm.com). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Ep. 35: Data Science for All - From Mundane to Magic with PixieDust

Earlier this month, Compose’s JP Phillips (@ jipperinbham) gave a talk at CoreOS Fest, “Data Pipelines Made Easier with Kubernetes.” JP joins the New Builders to share a little bit about his talk (3:06) and broader issues around containers and open source, including the current state of Kubernetes (7:24), the role of Compose Transporter as an ETL pipeline (11:05), CoreOS’s etcd and the emergence of zetcd to serve ZooKeeper requests (13:30), and how Compose’s Governor project (providing autofailover and HA for PostgreSQL) laid the groundwork for Patroni (15:13).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@ JW_Young) or email (jwyoung@us.ibm.com). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Ep. 36: All About the State - Checking in from CoreOS Fest

Glynn Bird (@ glynn_bird) remembers the days when he had to install servers in racks and maintain connectivity manually. Since then, the unit of scalability has evolved from the server to the platform – and now to individual event-driven functions.

In this episode, Glynn gives a primer on function-as-a-service (FaaS) and Apache OpenWhisk™, including why you can think of FaaS as “the ultimate microservice” and an extension of PaaS (4:00), why a FaaS and microservices approach may be a better fit for startups and teams that need to keep things small (8:40), how to get started with OpenWhisk (11:40), and how he used OpenWhisk and IBM Cloudant to program his Alexa to report temperature readings from his house (16:52).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@ JW_Young) or email (jwyoung@us.ibm.com). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Ep. 37: The FaaS and the Furious - Serverless Architecture with Apache OpenWhisk

In the world of wealth management and financial investments, even the most sophisticated risk management tools aren’t always enough to shield a portfolio from catastrophic losses.

Rob Seidman and Rob Hodgson from IBM Cloud for Financial Services are trying to solve this problem with Investment Insights with Watson, a tool that uses natural language processing and graph database technology to contextualize the impact of news events on investments.

In this episode of the New Builders Podcast, they start by sharing the backstory behind the tool, involving the indictment of a politician who had a large insider stake in a company that a sovereign wealth fund had invested in years prior, and the inability of traditional risk management practices to “stress test” an individual (5:00).

From there, they discuss the limitations of risk management and its tendency to rely exclusively on structured data (7:14), how the graph database embedded in Investment Insights with Watson enables risk managers to determine whether news could impact their portfolio (12:00), their surprise at database integration with IBM Cloudant taking only one day (17:55), and how the market has been “blown away” by the power of the tool (21:30).

To learn more about Investment Insights with Watson, try the starter kit for yourself or watch the tool in action.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@ JW_Young) or email (jwyoung@us.ibm.com). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Ep. 38: All the News That's Fit to Impact Your Investment Portfolio

Today’s applications are central to decision-making at all levels of society – whether it’s helping municipal governments monitor critical infrastructure using smart sensor data, or helping consumers find the nearest store to buy their favorite brand of cereal. The New Builders podcast features interviews with the innovators behind these apps, in which they reveal their best practices, latest projects and favorite tools.