Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Hosts new and old gather together for this special episode of the podcast! We'll talk about our favorite episodes of the year, the coolest things from 2019, and wrap up another great year together doing what we love! Happy Holidays to all of our listeners, and we'll see you in the new year!

Top episodes of the year

• GCP Podcast Episode 173: Cloud Run with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 165: Python with Dustin Ingram podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 175: MongoDB with Andrew Davidson podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 160: Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 164: Node.js with Myles Borins podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 174: Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 176: Human-Centered AI with Di Dang podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast

Favorite episodes of the year

• Mark Mirchandani's Favorites:
  • GCP Podcast Episode 193: Devoted Health and Data Science with Chris Albon podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 177: Primer with John Bohannon podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 202: Supersolid with Kami May podcast
• Mark Mandel's Favorites:
  • GCP Podcast Episode 186: Blockchain with Allen Day podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 196: Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston podcast
• Jon's Favorites:
  • GCP Podcast Episode 199: Data Visualization with Manuel Lima podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 196: Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 206: ML/AI with Zack Akil podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 201: FACEIT with Maria Laura Scuri podcast
• Gabi's Favorites:
  • GCP Podcast Episode 199: Data Visualization with Manuel Lima podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 206: ML/AI with Zack Akil podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 198: SeMI Technologies with Laura Ham podcast

Favorite things of the year

• Mark Mirchandani's Favorites:
  • Cloud Run
• Mark Mandel's Favorites:
  • Stadia
  • Samurai Shodown available on Stadia
  • All the new podcast hosts!
• Jon's Favorites:
  • First time doing the podcast at NEXT and it was quite the experience.
  • Going to Nvidia offices to do an episode
  • Getting to talk to guests in the gaming industry and hear how passionate they are about the things they are building
  • Joining the podcast
  • Podcast outtakes!
• Gabi's Favorites:
  • Visited a bunch of offices!
  • Joining the podcast
  • Cloud NEXT talk, where my demo failed but I recovered!
  • Spreading the love and joy of databases

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirch' will be sleeping as much as possible!

Mandel will be working on plans for Next, GDC, and I/O 2020!

Gabi will be running away to warm weather for her winter vacation!

Jon will be home! He'll also be planning gaming content for next year and wrapping up this year with some deep dives into multiplayer games and some possible content!

Sound Effects Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Incorrect" by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org
• "Correct" by Epon of Freesound.org
• "Fireworks 3 Bursts" by AtomWrath of Freesound.org
• "Jingle Romantic" by Jay_You of Freesound.org
• "Dark Cinematic" by Michael-DB of Freesound.org
• "Bossa Loop" by Reinsamba of Freesound.org

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are joined today by fellow Googler Zack Akil to discuss machine learning and AI advances at Google. First up, Zack explains some of the ways AutoML Vision and Video can be used to make life easier. One example is how Google Photos are automatically tagged, allowing them to be searchable thanks to AutoML. Developers can also train their own AutoML to detect specific scenarios, such as laughing in a video.

We also talk Cloud Next 2019 and learn how Zack comes up with ideas for his cool demos. His goal is to inspire people to incorporate machine learning into their projects, so he tries to combine hardware and exciting technology to think of fun, creative ways developers can use ML. Recently, he made a smart AI bicycle that alerts riders of possible danger behind them through a system of lights and a project to track and photograph balls as they fly through the air after being kicked.

To wrap it all up, Zack tells us about some cool projects he's heard people use AutoML for (like bleeping out tv show spoilers in online videos!) and the future of the software.

Zack Akil

When he's not teaching machine learning at Google, Zack likes to teach machine learning at his hands-on data science meetup, Central London Data Science Project Nights. Although he works in the cloud, most of his hobby projects look at different ways you can embed machine learning into low-power devices like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. He also likes to have a bit of banter with his mixed tag rugby teams.

Cool things of the week

• Stackdriver Logging comes to Cloud Code in Visual Studio Code blog
• Open Match v0.8 was released last month site
• Cloud Spanner now supports the WITH clause blog

Interview

• Zack's Website site
• Cloud AutoML site
• AutoML Video docs
• AutoML Vision site
• AutoML Vision Object Detection docs
• Coral site
• TensorFlow.js site
• Central London Data Science Meetup site

Question of the week

How do I run Cloud Functions in a local environment?

Where can you find us next?

Zack will be at DevRelCon.

Gabi will be taking time to recharge after conference season, then visiting family.

Jon will be attending several baby showers.

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Sparkling Effect A" by CetSoundCrew of Freesound.org

Happy Thanksgiving! This week, Aja and Brian are talking DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble. Our guests thoroughly explain what DevOps is and why it's important. DevOps purposely has no official definition but can be thought of as a community of practice that aims to make large-scale systems reliable and secure. It's also a way to get developers and operations to work together to focus on the needs of the customer.

Nathen later tells us all about DevOpsDays, a series of locally organized conferences occurring in cities around the world. The main goal is to bring a cross-functional group of people together to talk about how they can improve IT, DevOps, business strategy, and consider cultural changes the organization might benefit from. DevOpsDays supports this by only planning content for half the conference, then turning over the other half to attendees via Open Spaces. At this time, conference-goers are welcome to propose a topic and start a conversation.

Jez then describes the Accelerate State of DevOps Report, how it came to be, and why it's so useful. It includes items like building security into the software, testing continuously, ideal management practices, product development practices, and more. With the help of the DevOps Quick Check, you can discover the places your company could use some help and then refer back to the report for suggestions of improvements in those areas.

Nathen Harvey

Nathen Harvey helps the community understand and apply DevOps and SRE practices in the cloud. He is part of the global organizing committee for the DevOpsDays conferences and was a technical reviewer for the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report.

Jez Humble

Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner "Accelerate" and Jolt Award winner "Continuous Delivery". He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He works for Google Cloud as a technology advocate and teaches at UC Berkeley.

Cool things of the week

• It's a wrap: Key announcements from Next '19 UK blog
• Explainable AI site
• Hand-drawn Graphviz diagrams blog
  • Add one line to plot in XKCD comic sketchy style site

Interview

• DevOps insights from Google site
• DevOps Quick Check site
• DevOpsDays site
• Agile Alliance site
• Velocity Conference site
• DevOps Enterprise Summit site

Question of the week

Why do you need the Cloud SQL Proxy?

Where can you find us next?

DevOpsDays has events coming up across the globe, including Galway, Warsaw, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Nathen and Jez will be at Delivery Conf.

Aja will be home drinking tea!

Brian will also be home drinking tea!

Mark Mirchandani hosts solo today but is later joined by fellow Googler and Developer Advocate Ray Tsang to talk Java! Ray tells us what's new with Java 11, including more memory and fewer restrictions for developers. One of the greatest things for Ray is using Java 11 in App Engine because of the management support that it provides.

Later, we talk about Spring Boot on GCP. Ray explains the many benefits of using this framework. Developers can get their projects started much more quickly, for example, and with Spring Cloud GCP, it's easy to integrate GCP services like Spanner and run your project in the cloud. For users looking to containerize their Java projects, JIB can help you do this without having to write a Dockerfile.

At the end of the show, Ray and Mark pull it all together by explaining how Spring Boot, Cloud Code, Skaffold, and proper dev-ops can work together for a seamless Java project.

Ray Tsang

Ray is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform and a Java Champion. Ray works with engineering and product teams to improve Java developer productivity on GCP. He also helps Alphabet companies migrate and adopt cloud native architecture. Prior to Google, Ray worked at Red Hat, Accenture, and other consulting companies, where he focused on enterprise architecture, managed solutions delivery, and contributed to open source projects. Aside from technology, Ray enjoys traveling and adventures.

Cool things of the week

• Cloud Run is now GA blog
• Budget API in Beta blog

Interview

• App Engine site
• Micronaut site
• Quarkus site
• Java 11 on App Engine blog and docs
• Spring Boot and Spring Cloud site
• Spring Cloud GCP Projects site
• Cloud Spanner site
• Spring Cloud Sleuth site
• Stackdriver site
• Bootiful GCP: To Production! blog
• Effective Cloud Native Spring Boot on Kubernetes & Google Cloud Platform blog
• JDBC drivers site
• Hibernate ORM with Cloud Spanner docs
• Effective Cloud Native Spring Boot on Kubernetes & Google Cloud Platform blog
• Dev to Prod with Spring on GCP in 20 Minutes (Cloud Next '19) video
• Cloud Code site
• JIB site
• Skaffold site
• Debugger site
• Troubleshooting & Debugging Microservices in Kubernetes blog
• Cloud Code Quickstart docs
• Spring (or Java) to Kubernetes Faster and Easier blog
• GCP Podcast Episode 58: Java with Ray Tsang and Rajeev Dayal podcast

Question of the week

How do I dockerize my Java app?

• video
• github

Where can you find us next?

Ray is taking a break for the holidays, but in the future, you can find him at Java and JUG conferences.

Mark is hanging out in the Bay Area, but Google Cloud Next in London and KubeCon and CloudNativeCon are happening now!

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Tre-Loco1" by Sonipro of Freesound.org
• "Mens Sincere Laughter" by Urupin of Freesound.org
• "Party Pack" by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
• "DrumRoll" by HolyGhostParty of Freesound.org
• "Tension" by ERH of Freesound.org

Jon and Aja host our guest Donna Malayeri this week to learn all about Cloud Run and Anthos! Designed to provide serverless containers, Cloud Run has two versions: fully managed and Cloud Run for Anthos.

Donna's passion for serverless projects and containers shows as we discuss how these options benefit developers and customers. With containers, developers are able to go serverless without a lot of the typical restrictions, and because they are a standard format, containers are fairly easy to learn to use. Tools such as Ko can even do the work of generating docker containers for you. One of Cloud Run's most unique features is that it allows developers to bring existing applications. You don't have to rewrite your entire app to make it serverless! Developers can also reuse instances, making the process more efficient and cost effective.

Cloud Run for Anthos allows projects to stay on-prem while still enjoying the benefits of containers and the Cloud Run platform.

Later in the show, Donna tells us about Knative, which is the API Cloud Run is based on that helps create portability between Cloud Run versions, as well as portability to other vendors. We also get to hear the weirdest things she's seen put in a container and run in Cloud Run!

Donna Malayeri

Donna Malayeri is a product manager for Cloud Run for Anthos. She's worked in the serverless space since 2016 and is bullish on the future of serverless. Prior to joining Google, she was the first product manager at the Seattle startup, Pulumi. She was also a product manager on the Azure Functions team at Microsoft, guiding the developer experience from its beta through the first year of general availability. Donna is passionate about creating products that developers love and has worked on programming languages such as F# and Scala.

Cool things of the week

• Bringing Google AutoML to 3.5 million data scientists on Kaggle blog
• GCP Podcast has a website on dev site
• Command and control now easier in BigQuery with scripting and stored procedures bog
• Skaffold now GA blog

Interview

• Cloud Run site
• Cloud Run for Anthos site
• Anthos site
• Ko site
• Buildpacks site
• Google Cloud Functions site
• Kubernetes site
• Knative site
• Serverless: An ops experience of a programming model? video

Question of the week

How do I write a Matchmaking function in OpenMatch?

• OpenMatch 0.8RC
• OpenMatch Slack
• OpenMatch Twitter
• Jon's Twitter

Where can you find us next?

Donna will be at Google Cloud Next in London.

Aja will also be attending Google Cloud Next in London.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Anime Cat Girl" by KurireeVA of Freesound.org
• "Anime Sword Hit" by Syna-Max of Freesound.org
• "Wedding Bells" by Maurice_J_K of Freesound.org
• "Big Dinosaur Whirrs" by RobinHood76 of Freesound.org
• "Cat Purring & Meow" by SkyMary of Freesound.org

This week, Mark and Jon bring us a fascinating interview with Kami May of Supersolid, a gaming company in London. With the help of Kami May, Supersolid recently launched their first multiplayer game, Snake Rivals. This session-based game puts players in an arena where they can choose from three modes: endless, gold rush, or battle royale.

To produce the game, Supersolid makes use of many GCP products. Snake Rivals is powered by Kubernetes and Agones, which Kami chose because it offers functionality that works well with gaming. It provides server allocation which allows players to continue play even during an update, has the ability to scale, allows labeling, allows for different gaming modes, and more. To reduce latency, Supersolid operates in nine regions. Supersolid uses BigQuery and continuously gathers data so they can make adjustments to make sure game play is efficient, fun, and functional. Kami explains that navigating the world of multiplayer gaming for the first time was tricky, but the Google support team has been very helpful!

Kami May

Kami May is a Senior Server Developer at London-based mobile games studio, Supersolid. Her lifetime passion for video games drove her to join the games industry soon after graduating from university in 2016. Since then, Kami has worked on multiple titles for mobile, PC, and console. Most recently, she's been bringing Supersolid's most ambitious project to date - Snake Rivals - to life, powered by Agones on GCP. In her free time she can be found at the top of the ladder on Path of Exile, chasing the 6k MMR dream on Dota 2, or searching for London's best fried chicken.

Cool things of the week

• Keep Parquet and ORC from the data graveyard with new BigQuery features blog
• Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI site
• Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly's shortened cloud migration blog

Interview

• Supersolid site
• Snake Rivals site
• Agones site
• Kuberentes site
• Go site
• Cloud Load Balancing site
• BigQuery site
• Stackdriver site
• Supersolid Careers site
• Snake Rivals on Google Play site
• Snake Rivals on iTunes site

Question of the week

What are best practices for setting up user accounts in Cloud IAM?

• Quickstart Guide
• Service Accounts Docs
• Using IAM Securely

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be working on blogs and videos at home.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Human has been Nutralised" by cityrocker of Freesound.org
• "Laser Automatic Heavy" by dpren of Freesound.org
• "Gong Sabi" by Veiler of Freesound.org

Happy Halloween! Today, Jon Foust and Brian Dorsey chat with Maria Laura Scuri of FACEIT about ways they are reducing toxicity in gaming. FACEIT is a competitive gaming platform that helps connect gamers and game competition and tournament organizers. In order to do this well, FACEIT has put a lot of energy into finding ways to keep the experience positive for everyone.

Because gaming toxicity can involve anything from verbal jabs to throwing a game, FACEIT uses a combination of data collecting programs and input from players to help identify toxic behavior. In identifying this behavior, FACEIT has to consider not only the literal words spoken or actions made, but the context around them. Is that player being rude to strangers or is he egging on a friend? The answer to this question could change the behavior from unacceptable to friendly banter. Using their own machine learning model, interactions are then given a score to determine how toxic the player was in that match.

The toxicity scores along with their program, Minerva, determine if any bans should be put on a player. FACEIT focuses on punishing player behavior, rather than the player themselves, in an effort to help players learn from the experience and change the way they interact with others in the future.

Maria's advice to other companies looking to help reduce toxicity on their platforms is to know the context of the toxic event. Know how toxicity can express itself on your platform and find ways to deal with all of them. She also suggests tackling the issues of toxicity in small portions and celebrating the small wins! Her final piece of advice is to focus on criticizing the behavior of the user rather than attacking them personally.

Maria Laura Scuri

Maria is the Director of Business Intelligence at FACEIT, the leading competitive platform for online multiplayer games with over 15 million users. She joined FACEIT as part of the core team in 2013 as an intern assisting with everything from customer support to event management. Her passion for data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence saw her quickly rise through the ranks to her current position, leading the Business Intelligence and Data Science teams.

Maria works side by side with some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Google Cloud. She is the main lead on a number of projects including the inception of an Artificial Intelligence Admin to fight toxicity on the platform. Maria is responsible for implementing best practices around data visualization and tools that allow the FACEIT team to thrive, as well as sourcing and training new talent.

Maria is a huge video games fan. You can find her on League of Legends as "FACEIT Lulu" and on Steam as "Sephariel".

Cool things of the week

• What can Google Cloud do for you? New trainings for business professionals blog
• Leave no database behind with Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog
• How to orchestrate Cloud Dataprep jobs using Cloud Composer blog
• Updates make Cloud AI platform faster and more flexible blog
• Use GKE usage metering to combat over-provisioning blog

Interview

• FACEIT site
• FACEIT blog
• FACEIT on Medium site
• Steam site
• Perspective API site
• BigQuery site
• Looker site
• Cloud Datalab site
• Jupyter Notebook site
• Cloud AI Platform site
• TensorFlow site
• Google Cloud Data Labeling site
• Google Translation site]
• Dealing with CS:GO Free to Play and Addressing Toxicity in Matches blog
• Revealing Minerva and addressing toxicity and abusive behaviour in matches blog
• One of Europe's Largest Gaming Platforms is Tackling Toxicity with Machine Learning blog
• FACEIT And Google Partner To Use AI To Tackle In Game Toxicity article
• FACEIT implement Minerva, an AI to punish toxicity in CSGO blog
• FACEIT Takes On Toxicity With Machine Learning article
• Exploring Cyberbullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games whitepaper
• Toxic Behavior in Online Games whitepaper
• A Look at Gaming Culture and Gaming Related Problems: From a Gamer's Perspective whitepaper
• An Analysis of (Bad) Behavior in Online Video Games whitepaper
• Toxicity detection in multiplayer online games whitepaper
• Jon's gaming info steam
  • BattleNet: Syntax#11906

Question of the week

When I SSH into my VM via different methods (Cloud Console, GCloud, terminal/command prompt) I get a different username… What can I do to make that static?

• OS Login

Where can you find us next?

FACEIT will be at Next London and GDC

Brian will be at Super Computing in Denver.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland and Montreal in December.

We're sad to say goodbye to Mark Mandel this week but excited to bring you an interview he and guest host Robert Martin did with Björn Lindberg of Massive Entertainment. The gaming studio is located in Sweden and owned by Ubisoft. Their most recent game, The Division 2, is a "looter shooter" game that was released in March. It can be played solo or users can be matched up to play with or against others.

To keep the game running smoothly, Massive employs a micro-service architecture to divide and conquer the trials of creating and running such a large, intense game. The Division 2 was launched with Google Cloud, a process Björn says was a bit easier than launching on physical hardware. Autoscaling in the cloud has created a simpler, more trustworthy gaming process as well, and by connecting to data centers in multiple regions, they're able to decrease latency.

Björn Lindberg

Björn Lindberg is working as On-Line technical director at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft owned and operated game studio in Malmö Sweden. He does design and implementation of on-line backend systems for large AAA on-line games such as The Division series of games and World in Conflict.

Interview

• Massive Entertainment site
• The Division 2 site
• Ubisoft site
• Terraform site
• Grafana site
• Compute Engine site

Thank You Mark!

Thank you Mark for everything you've done to make this podcast a success! We'll miss you!

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are back today and joined by fellow Googler Manuel Lima. In this episode, Manuel tells us all about data visualization, what it means, why it's important, and the best ways to do it effectively.

For Google and its mission, data visualization is especially necessary in facilitating the accessibility of information. It "makes the invisible visible" because of the way it can decode meaningful data patterns. Working across multiple GCP products, Manuel and his team build advanced visualization models that go beyond graphs and bar charts to things like sophisticated time lines that aid in the progression from data to usable knowledge. They have also created guidelines for things like what kind of graphical language to use, what type of charts users might need, and more. These guidelines, originally used only internally, have now been adjusted and released for use by developers outside Google with the help of the Material.io team.

The guidelines are based around the six data visualization principles that help users get started. They can be employed to plan and inspire an entire project or to evaluate a specific data visualization chart. Some of the most important principles are to be honest and to lend a helping hand. You can read more in their Medium article, Six Principles for Designing Any Chart.

Manuel Lima

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009," Manuel Lima is the founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Google, and a regular teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design.

Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various publications and media outlets, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Fast Company, Forbes, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Design Observer, Creative Review, Eye, Grafik, étapes, and El País. His first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His latest, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, covers 1,000 hundred years of humanity's long-lasting obsession with all things circular.

With more than twelve years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. During the course of his MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Cool things of the week

• Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine? New trainings teach you the basics of architecting on Google Cloud blog
• Stadia comes next month site
• Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for the fourth consecutive time blog
• Google Hardware Event
  • Pixel 4 is here to help blog
  • Meet the new Google Pixel Buds blog
  • Nest Mini brings twice the bass and an upgraded Assistant blog
  • More affordable and portable: let's Pixelbook Go blog

Interview

• Material.io site
• Data Visualization Guides site
• Six Principles for Designing Any Chart article
• Google's six rules for great data design article
• BigQuery site
• Stackdriver site
• Google Analytics site

Question of the week

What are the most common products used in cloud gaming?

• Cloud Spanner for storing player authentication and inventory or long-term state storage site
• Redis is used in Open Match
• VM's have been the most commonly used product for game servers but there has been a shift to Kubernetes
• Pub/Sub

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

Jon will be at Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match.

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Jingle Romantic" by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Today on the podcast, Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust share a great interview with Laura Ham, Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies. At SeMI Technologies, Laura works with their project Weaviate, an open-source knowledge graph program that allows users to do a contextualized search based on inputted data. However, unlike traditional databases, Weaviate attaches meanings and links within the data.

Laura details what knowledge graphs are and how they can be useful for both small and large projects. Explaining that ontology is the meaning of words, she tells us how Weaviate is able to use this concept to make more specific data entries and links, allowing users to perform better and more informative searches. Weaviate is able to do this with the help of Kubernetes. Later, Laura tells Gabi and Jon the ways Weaviate helps developers and users with thorough documentation, assistance with troubleshooting, and support from solution engineers.

Laura Ham

Laura is the Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies, where she takes care of building and supporting a community around their open source software product, Weaviate. She also takes care of the developer and user experience within the business, which means she writes documentation to support both developers and users, as well as researches and evaluates new software implementations on user experience. She has a user-centered approach in the work that she develops and designs. Laura is a full-time graduate student in Human Computer Interaction and Design with a special focus on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at EIT Digital Master School. Here, she learns about how to develop and design technology from a user perspective, and how to apply this with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Cool things of the week

• Use G Suite to make documents (and other tools) more accessible to people with disabilities blog
• 4 steps to stop data exfiltration with Google Cloud blog
• Using Colab to get more out of BigQuery blog
• Updates to AutoML Vision Edge, Auto ML Video, & AutoML Intelligence API blog

Interview

• SeMI Technologies site
• Weaviate site
• Weaviate GitHub github
• Weaviate documentation site
• GraphQL API github
• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• Cloud BigTable site
• SeMI Technologies Meetups site

Question of the week

When will Python 2 reach the end of its life, and what does that mean for GCP?

• Python Google Cloud Client Libraries only support Python 3 github
• Countdown to end of life site

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

Jon will be at his twin's wedding! Then Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match.

SeMI Technologies will be hosting meetups in NYC on October 24th, the Bay Area on October 25th, and Amsterdam on November 7th.

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Small Group Laugh 6" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "Small Group Laugh 2" by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• "02 Storm Orage" by ArnaudCoutancier of Freesound.org
• "Harry Potter Theme", a clunky midi file rendition of music originally composed by John Williams. Purchase the soundtrack on Amazon