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This week I have attended the Big Data Spain 2015 conference. The format of this conference is:

• 2 tracks with no thematic separation
• Spanned over 2 days
• Talk duration around 45 minutes length, except some lightning talks (appropriately named talkreduce()) of 15 minutes or so

I would like to share some links and notes on some talks and ideas that I have picked.

Paco Nathan (@pacoid) did a news recap in his talk about Data Science in 2016: Moving up with (literally) tons of links to different sources. I have selected three:

The second and last day of operability.io has been packed of interesting talks. In the following paragraphs I’ll pick some details about each talk.

Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) has talked about Building a World Class Ops Teams. Very valuable thoughts as:

• If you are a startup, you need an ops team only if you need extreme reliability, scalability, security or you are tackling with operational category problems for the whole internet. Otherwise, stick with your lean dev team.
• Things that predict a good ops candidate: strong automation skills, ownership of their systems, strong opinions weakly held (yeah, I think that this is a characteristic of excellent professionals anywhere), love to simplify, good communication skills, calm in crisis, respect to processes, empathy.
• Things that do NOT predict a good ops candidate: whiteboard coding exercises, degrees, knowledge in any particular technology, big company pedigree.
• In order to hire: make good questions that probe the candidate’s self-reported strengths, related to your real problems. Look for strengths, not for lack of weaknesses.
• Things that are dangerous in ops engineers: tweaking indefinitely, adding complexity, walling off production environment from developers, refusal to admit that they don’t know things, disconnection from customer experience.
• If you want to retain good ops engineers, treat them well, empower them and give them interesting and motivating problems to solve.
• Finally, on my view, a very sharp description of the profile: A good operations engineer is broadly literate and can go deep on at least one or two things

David Mytton (@davidmytton) has told us how they deal with incidents at Server Density. Also great advice:

Today I’ve been attending operability.io, a conference about DevOps but focusing on the Ops part of the term. The conference has only one track and the speakers are hand-picked, seriously cool speakers chosen by the organization.

In general terms, I have found that the talks have been about philosophical or psychological aspects of DevOps and not about technical aspects. I get that probably this is the leitmotiv of this conference (principles over tools, and so), but code and demos definitely beat slides with pics and cool sentences :-)

In the recent years the game of Geocaching has steadily grown in popularity as a hobby and outdoor activity. Basically, Geocaching consists on a worldwide-played game in which people hide caches (containers with at least a paper log) and publish their coordinates over the internet so that other players can find them and log them. It is very addictive, believe me.

There are many applications to play Geocaching with a smartphone, being probably the most famous c:geo. If you have a data connection available, it works great, but when you are in a remote area or abroad (and you don’t want to sell your house to pay the roaming taxes), an offline strategy is more suitable. C:geo and download caches for later offline usage, but doing so for many caches is tedious. C:geo, as well as many other applications and devices (GPS receivers, for example), is able to load a GPX file with the information of the caches, including the coordinates, description, hints, logs written by the latest visitors and other bites of useful information.

Recently I have discovered the Autotools suite for compiling/packaging C applications. I have played with it a little bit, following the examples and hints from this book, and I have found that it is an incredibly useful toolkit.

I am going to describe an example of how a tiny C command-line application can be packaged and delivered using Autotools. I will also include a dynamic library in order to make it more realistic.

I’ve been giving a talk about Embedding and extending Ansible with Python at EuroPython 2015 in Bilbao. The slides of the talk are available here and the repo with the source code here. Thanks everybody!

UPDATE: The video of the talk is now available

The RaspberryPi / Arduino combo kit is a winner option when prototyping an IoT-style project.

The Raspberry Pi, as a cheap, low-powered, full-blown Linux machine, can interact with other systems via network connectivity and harness the power of high-level languages and abstractions, whereas it can offload the duty of interfacing the circuitry to the Arduino, which is in turn best suited for this tasks. The Arduino board can efficiently read analog signals, has better voltage/current protection and can take advantage of the myriad of shields and modules available in the market to expand its functionality.

Hi!

This is my Hello World! post.

I’m testing the features of Nikola as a static site builder. Looks nice :-)