It's that time of year for the annual conversation between The New Builders and ODPi, the Linux Foundation project standardizing the big data ecosystem around Apache™ Hadoop®.

We met up with ODPi VP of Technology Roman Shoposhnik at ApacheCon 2017 in Miami, building on the interview we conducted last year with ODPi Director John Mertic in Vancouver.

Roman shares how he sets a fair technical agenda for ODPi as VP of Technology (5:30), ODPi's moves toward tighter integration with ASF (7:55), why he thinks of ODPi as the "commercial yin" to the "open source yang" of the Apache Bigtop project that he founded (11:25), and why IoT's prominence today reminds him of Big Data a decade ago (13:10).

Register for the IBM Data Science Bootcamp at Spark Summit to learn the ins and outs of the open source PixieDust library and how it simplifies working in a Jupyter Notebook.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@JW_Young) or email ([email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

The data layer doesn't always get the top billing it deserves in app development circles. To shine a light on the databases that power today's top apps, Compose is hosting its second annual DataLayer event on Wednesday, May 17 at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin.

To preview DataLayer, we're joined by Thom Crowe (@thomcrowe) from Compose, who shares a bit about what to expect at DataLayer - from a range of data services to the power of polyglot persistence. He also previews the keynote by Honeycomb's Charity Majors, "Observability and the Glorious Future" (3:23).

Then, we're joined by a DataLayer 2017 speaker, Meteor's Jonas Helfer (@helferjs), who previews his talk, "Joins Across Databases with GraphQL," and shares a little about his work with Apollo and GraphQL (11:53).

Register for DataLayer today and enter promo code "IBM" at checkout to receive a discount on your ticket.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Watson Data Platform at ibm.co/watsondataplatform. Contact host Jim Young on Twitter (@JW_Young) or email ([email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

After playing to two full houses at SXSW, the panel "From Mobile First and Offline First" is taking over the airwaves of the New Builders Podcast.

For this third go-round, Offline Camp alums Maureen McElaney (IBM Watson Data Platform), Gregor Martynus (Neighbourhoodie), Nolan Lawson (Microsoft Edge and PouchDB) and Dan Zajdband (OpenNews) are joined by Alex Russell (Google Chrome) for a wide-ranging conversation on Offline First application development - the process of building apps to maintain performance even during network disruptions or downtime.

The panel discusses the indicators of a poor offline experience (12:45), how progressive web apps relate to offline first development (16:43), their current offline first projects and favorite tools and frameworks, including IBM Cloudant and Apache® CouchDB™ (23:10), why offline first could spell the end of the save button and lead to new design patterns (37:23), and how to get started (and what not to do) with offline first (54:26).

To learn more about Offline First app development, subscribe to Offline Camp on Medium, Twitter at @OfflineCamp or YouTube at Offline First.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

This week, we're previewing everything InterConnect has to offer to developers - keynotes, demos and even a welcome event Sunday night if you happen to be in town.

The team from Harmony kicks off the episode with a preview of the keynote address in which they'll be featured, "Data Science: Unleash Intelligent Client Experiences" (Tuesday, March 21, 11:30am-12:15pm | Cloud Theater, Bayside A).

Matt Brooke-Smith and Jenny Grinblo introduce the Harmony platform and the way in which it democratizes mobile app development (8:42), how customers in industries as diverse as energy and mental health are using Harmony (14:02), and how managed instances of PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ within the IBM Watson Data Platform enable the Harmony team to spin up a data layer "in less time than it takes to boil a kettle" (18:13).

Next, two New Builders regulars, Gregor Martynus and Steven Trevathan, drop by to share the process that went into building "Voice of InterConnect," a demo application that will be showcased in the DevZone during InterConnect (you can watch the video simulcast here).

Voice of InterConnect (details on GitHub) is a progressive web application that showcases the offline first development approach - in that it works without a network connection. Gregor and Steven walk through the various aspects of the app, including the offline-friendly back-end built on IBM Cloudant and Hoodie (26:16), speech-to-text and natural language services powered by IBM Watson (31:52), and a snazzy visualization reflecting the sentiment of user-generated responses (33:42).

Register for "The New Builders: Ideas on Tap" welcome event, Sunday, March 19, 7-10:30pm. Find out more about the data and analytics activities planned for InterConnect 2017.

The TV landscape has progressed far beyond the days of the Big Three television networks and single-TV households. For media companies, this wave of new cable channels and OTT providers, plus consumer behaviors like cord-cutting, has increased pressure to optimize programming schedules and hyper-target audiences for advertising purposes.

On this episode, Shiv Sehgal joins the New Builders Podcast to explain how RSG Media's (@RSGMediaSystems) Media Mantra platform, built on the IBM Watson Data Platform, enables media companies to process data on the fly.

Shiv discusses how Media Mantra processes Nielsen TV ratings and infuses it with data from new sources like Netflix and Hulu (7:47), the role of the dashDB data warehousing service in performing SQL jobs and bringing data together (11:38), the data science "horsepower" provided by Apache Spark (18:17), and how RSG Media got to the bottom of the NFL's viewership loss problem last fall (24:52).

Watch RSG Media CEO Mukesh Sehgal's keynote address from World of Watson 2016 on how the IBM Watson Data Platform powers Media Mantra.

Listen to the intro of this episode to hear about our upcoming trips to Game Developers Conference, SXSW and InterConnect, where we'll be hosting a welcome event, "Ideas on Tap."

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

IBM Developer Advocate Mark Watson (@markwatsonatx) joins developerWorks TV's Calvin Powers (@cspowers) to preview his talk at DeveloperWeek 2017, "Building and Designing Bots and Bot Architectures."

Mark discusses developers' interest in incorporating chatbots into their apps (4:18), the different types of chatbots and the messaging platforms upon which they can be built (4:58), the process and architectural components involved in building a chatbot (7:14), and how you can get started with your own chatbot using OpenWhisk, a JSON doc store for data persistence and Watson Conversation Service for natural language processing (9:01).

Learn more about Mark's work by reading his tutorial, "Persisting Data for a Smarter Chatbot," or follow Mark's Developer Advocacy team at the IBM Watson Data Lab, featured on Github and Medium.

You can get started building a chatbot of your own through the Chatbot Accelerator by developerWorks.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

Kamal Shannak (@shannakam) and his team have been building IBM Graph since 2015. In that short time, they've become part of a growing group of enthusiasts and fans of graph databases - a relatively new database technology.

In this interview, Kamal and podcast host Kamille Nixon (@kamillenixon) discuss the beginnings of IBM Graph and the important role of Apache TinkerPop™ in building the service (5:43), the most common cases where graph excels (13:11), how graph databases fit into a multi-DB approach (16:41), and graph's role as a persistence layer for other services, including Watson (27:12).

To learn more about graph databases, listen to the "New Builders Episode 12: Of Graphs and Gremlins," featuring Alaa Mahmoud.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

On the eve of his presentation at the Web 1.0 Conference – and a few weeks after attending Offline Camp California (give our recap a listen if you haven’t already) – Paul Frazee (@pfrazee) sat down with Teri Chadbourne (@EventTeri) to explain Beaker Browser, a P2P browser he wrote for the distributed web.

In the conversation, he shares why his preference for Offline First has more to do with independence and autonomy than user experience (5:08), how Beaker Browser fits into the broader context of the distributed web and Offline First (6:43), Beaker’s use of the Dat Protocol (featured on the New Builders last month) (12:27), the emergence of Apache CouchDB as one of the first CRDT (conflict-free replicated data type) databases (15:41), and the moment when he realized Offline Camp was more of a camp than he previously realized (24:10).

Watch Paul’s presentation from the Web 1.0 Conference, “The Distributed Web and the Browser I Built to Surf It,” and his passion talk from Offline Camp, “Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

As the New Builders Podcast closes out 2016, we talk to Ryan Baumann (@RyanBaumann), Sales Engineer for Mapbox, about the ins and outs of open source mapping. Ryan shares how Mapbox has differentiated from traditional mapping and geo visualization tools to be more friendly to the application developer (3:33); how his previous role at Caterpillar brought him to geo-based BI and analytics (11:01); how hard industries, agriculture and oil and gas are among the industries now entering the space (13:15); what new possibilities are offered by Mapbox’s new 3D vector based visualizations (17:34); and Ryan’s geo and mapping predictions for 2017 (22:40).

In Part II of the podcast (24:30), New Builders co-hosts Doug (@DSFlora) and Jim (@JW_Young) offer a brief retrospective on 2016 and struggle to think of New Years’ resolutions for the show. We do make it a point to thank our listeners, guests and all the fancy tools we use to bring you new episodes every week (or so).

Resources mentioned in the show:

IBM Cloud Data Services Open Crime Data project: http://opendata.mybluemix.net/static/crimes.html

IBM Cloudant + MapBox crime data visualization demo: http://crimedemos.mybluemix.net/

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!

There are large CSV files, and then there are CSV files like the ones Max Ogden (@denormalize) is familiar with through his work with academic and scientific researchers. In this case - a team of astronomers cataloguing every star they could see - we're talking 600 million lines of CSV and hundreds of gigabytes of data.

These sorts of massive research datasets require a specific tool to manage, and Ogden has helped built it, with the Dat Project. Dat is an open source, decentralized tool for versioning and syncing changes to data across distributed sets - making it especially useful for research data that needs to be published and archived.

In this episode, the New Builders brings you a conversation between Max and guest host Bradley Holt (@BradleyHolt), recorded live during Offline Camp California (along with a full slate of interviews). They talk about Max's longstanding work with Apache® CouchDB™ and how Couch helped him build single-page apps "before that was a thing" (2:02), what makes Dat ideal for storing and moving research data (3:30), how a data collection project evolved into his Cat Mapper work (9:37), what to expect at v3 of CSV Conf (10:26), and why Offline First could solve the rampant problem of 404 errors in scientific data (13:03).

Watch Max's passion talk from Offline Camp, "Acquiring Grant Funding for Open Source Projects," to learn tips and tricks for obtaining grant funding for scientific and open source projects.

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]). The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!