June 21, 2022

104: Exploring Our Data with Chris Grainger

48 minutes

Chris Grainger explains Explorer, Nx's recent addition. It's a “Data Frame” library which sounds far more nebulous than it is. It lets us explore and manipulate two-dimensional data like we already do with DB tables, spreadsheets, CSV files, etc. Only this works in memory, is faster, and has predefined functions that make it very powerful. Explorer fills an important slot in the overall pie for data science and ML in Elixir. However, Explorer is also one of the tools that “regular” Elixir devs can take advantage of today!

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/104

Elixir Community News

https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1535008937640181760 – At ElixirConf EU, José Valim announced there is an ongoing PhD scholarship for researching and developing a type system for Elixir that is powered by set-theoretic types.

https://www.irif.fr/~gc/ – Giuseppe Castagna's Home Page. Senior Research Scientist

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03354 – Programming with union, intersection, and negation types

https://twitter.com/fhunleth/status/1534826558774464512

https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/72 – Typecheck interview

https://github.com/ergo-services/ergo – We learned of a Golang library called “ergo” that is an “actor based Framework for creating microservices using technologies and design patterns of Erlang/OTP in Golang”

https://twitter.com/erlangforums/status/1534822378722713601 – Patch Package OTP 25.0.1 Released

https://erlangforums.com/t/patch-package-otp-25-0-1-released/1526 – Minor bug fixes. Zlib updated

https://flowbite.com/docs/getting-started/introduction/ – More free alternative to TailwindUI

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/releases/tag/v3.1.2 – tailwindcss CLI v3.1.2 released which includes postcss-import into the CLI bundle

https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1535989815778463746 – Adam Wathan, the Tailwind CSS guy, had a fun quote that we liked.

“Open source is “right to repair” for software — nothing more, nothing less. Maintain that attitude and any frustration or entitlement you feel will be replaced with gratitude. Better for maintainers, and better for you.”

Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at [email protected]

Discussion Resources

https://github.com/elixir-nx/explorer

https://hexdocs.pm/explorer/Explorer.html

https://hexdocs.pm/explorer/Explorer.DataFrame.html

https://hexdocs.pm/explorer/Explorer.Series.html

https://twitter.com/cigrainger/status/1518896955921154048 – Tweet about using Rustler and Rustler Precompiled

https://hexdocs.pm/explorer/exploring_explorer.html – Includes a “Ten Minutes to Explorer” Livebook guide in the docs to walk you through setup to getting started with a good overview.

https://www.cigrainger.com/posts/introducing-explorer/

https://databricks.com/glossary/what-are-dataframes

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/dsintro.html

https://dataframes.juliadata.org/stable/

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidyr/vignettes/tidy-data.html

https://github.com/dashbitco/table

https://huggingface.co/

https://www.amplified.ai/ – Chris' company

https://pandas.pydata.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract%2C_transform%2C_load

https://github.com/tyrchen/ex_polars – Library that got him started with Rust, Rustler and working with polars

https://hexdocs.pm/rustler_precompiled/RustlerPrecompiled.html

https://github.com/philss/rustler_precompiled

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main_classes/tokenizer

https://github.com/elixir-nx/tokenizers

https://docs.rs/crate/polars/0.22.0

https://github.com/pola-rs/polars

https://parquet.apache.org/

https://avro.apache.org/

https://arrow.apache.org/overview/

https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/dplyr/

Guest Information

https://twitter.com/cigrainger – on Twitter

https://github.com/cigrainger/ – on Github

https://cigrainger.com – Blog

Find us online

Message the show - @ThinkingElixir

Email the show - [email protected]

Mark Ericksen - @brainlid

David Bernheisel - @bernheisel

Cade Ward - @cadebward