cloud

Memcache Basics On Google App Engine

This week is packed with great content on “Google cloud platform”. I will summaries some of the talks we having in our office. The first talk I gave was on leveraging memcache when you developing with Google App Engine. Here is the summary:

What is Memcache?

Memcache is an in-memory key-value pairs data store. You can use the put(key, value) and get(key) in order to save and fetch data from it. key or value can be anything that is serializable. It’s important to remember that with GAE – Memcache is a shared service accessed via App Engine APIs. So it’s not a RAM base caching layer that you might have on a single server but a service that you will make a network call each time you write/read from it. Continue reading →

cloud, HTML5, JavaScript, mobile, php

Google Cloud Platform Update

Yesterday we had a very cool event at Google’s offices. There were many mobile and web developers that came to hear what is new with Google cloud technologies (among other thing). I’ve used this set of slides because I knew they will be useful to many more developers that miss the event. That is the reason, I’ve used ‘a lot’ of words on each slide.

The event was recorded and I will update this post with the video soon. Have a great 2014! Continue reading →

cloud, JavaScript

Big Query And Google Spreadsheet Integration

There are many options to extend the powerful spreadsheets that Google offers. One of the cool, new ways to leverage its power is by using a spreadsheet as your ‘front-end’ to a big data processing power (=Big Query). In our world, there is a need to get results as fast as possible and since our data sources grow fast. It’s nice to have a tool that let us ‘see’ (and share) results quickly and easily.

What is BigQuery?

Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets. When we saying massive we are talking here on billions of rows (or more). It is a scalable and easy to use tool that gives developers and businesses an easy way into powerful data analytics on demand.

As for Google Docs and their powerful sharing capabilities – I guess we don’t need to elaborate here. So, let’s see what are the steps that will let us get data from BigQuery into our Google spreadsheet.

Integrate BigQuery To Google Spreadsheet Continue reading →

Business, life

On Anti-fragility And The Black Swan

Since I’ve read “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility”, I found Talab’s ideas to be very interesting and practical. I appreciate the fact that he is not ‘only’ an academic scholar that is living in his ivory tower but rather an option trader that bring a lot of ‘street wise’ into his arguments. Here are two recent talks that he made that put some more light on these fascinating subjects: the concepts of antifragility and black swan events and their implications. Continue reading →

cloud

How to Install Spark on Google Compute Engine

What is Google Compute Engine?

Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service that lets you run your large-scale computing workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure. Btw, if you wish to have a new machine under your arms in less than 5 minutes – It can be done in 5 easy steps.

What is Spark?

Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing system that aims to make data analytics fast — both fast to run and fast to write. To run programs faster, Spark offers a general execution model that can optimize arbitrary operator graphs, and supports in-memory computing, which lets it query data faster than disk-based engines like Hadoop.

So in order to enjoy from both worlds, we can leverage the great options of large-scale cloud that Compute engine offer us and install Spark on it. Here are the few steps you will need to follow in order to do it.

Installation steps Continue reading →

Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Chrome DevTools Tips

A (good) web developer use several tools in order to be productive and built amazing projects. I guess, you can find advocates for Vim or Emacs but after you pass the phase of writing the code, it’s time to check why it’s not doing what you wish to see. You can find on Opera Dragonfly and in FireFox land there is Firebug. But, as you might guess already, my favorite tool is Chrome DevTools on Canary.

What are DevTools?

The Chrome Developer Tools are a set web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome. The DevTools provide web developers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application.

(!) If you are a front-end developer you should use Google Chrome Canary. It is easy to install it side by side your regular Chrome and it will give you the latest and greatest features with frequent improvements. This post is not a replacement to the one ‘source of true‘ but more of an update on the new features we have today (OCT 2013) in Canary. Checkout the pictures below with the green arrows that show you some of the interesting feature you can use. Continue reading →

Business, life

Startups Secret Strength

SFO bride to startups In this TED talk, Malcolm Gladwell shares with us a new point of view on the famous story of David and Goliath. This new angle to look at the situation(s) reminds us of the state any startup is facing. It takes a lot of work to build a new service/product and sometimes to create or educate a market. However, again and again, startups do it while the significant (well-funded) organizations need to catch up. What looks, at first, as a disadvantage (e.g., limited budget, small teams, members that need to do ‘everything,’ no support from other players in the market, etc.’) is a true advantage when you look deeper.
It forces the startup to be frugal, think out of the box, and be as productive as possible.

There is a nice phrase in Hebrew that, in a direct translation to English will look like this:

“We do the most difficult things immediately. The impossible takes us a little longer.” Continue reading →

HTML5, webdev

Google App Engine Intro

In this episode of Google Developer Live Israel I’ve covered in the first 6min how to work with Eclipse and Google plugin. This plugin is a great way to manage your app engine projects and to push your code to google cloud. The main goal of this video is to show developer how they can have a server up and running on Google App engine in few minutes. From 6:47 mark you can hear this explanations in hebrew… This part of the talk is tailored mainly for the developers/gamers that are coming to a hackathon event we have during this weekend around Hangout APIs. I am looking forward to see the cool games that will be built on this API…

Continue reading →

Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, webdev

Google Cloud And Mobile Web

Screen Shot 2013-09-26 at 9.41.45 AM

Two talks in one day…

That’s what I did yesterday for Google Developer Group (GDG) Athens, Greece. It was a great opportunity to talk about the new cool aspects of google cloud platform (Yep, checkout things like: NodeJS on Compute Engine, App engine new support for technologies, Monte Carlo Simulations with App Script, Cloud storage, Big Query and many more). We talked for the first 25min on the new aspects of developing mobile web sites (and/or mobile web apps). In one word – go check out yeoman.io. Of course, there are many more aspects that are in the slides, so feel free to browse them and please let me know if I’ve missed something important that you are using in your mobile web project. Continue reading →

Ido Green

Thoughts To Remember