Sparkour Day

My latest side project is Sparkour, an open-source collection of programming recipes for Apache Spark. Designed as an efficient way to navigate the intricacies of the Spark ecosystem, Sparkour aims to be an approachable, understandable, and actionable cookbook for distributed data processing.

Spark is the latest buzzword around BIG DATA, providing a way for developers to analyze and transform vast quantities of data very quickly. If you aren't in the programming world, Apache Spark probably means nothing to you. As a translation, I devoted 80 hours of my own time and $60 worth of books and hostnames over the past two weeks to learning about something new, writing about it, and publishing it to be torn apart (or possibly built up further) by the anonymous masses on the Internet. I earned exactly $0 and a heaping serving of intrinsic satisfaction.

My motivations for creating a knowledge resource instead of a library this time around were myriad:

• I enjoy teaching, and presenting material you have learned yourself is a great way to retain it.
• There will always be someone else out there willing to write a super-useful add-on to Spark but there aren't as many people who can write a coherent paragraph that explains the what, how, and why of the original.
• Laymen inherently understand what a cookbook of programming recipes is. Conversely, most people to this day don't really get what niche DDMSence fills. Sometimes I don't, myself.

If you use Spark at work, I hope this new project is useful! If you're already bored, I hope you like my logo!