Working from home is going to be new for a lot of people. I’m writing this in March 2020, where working from home is the new normal. So we’ll cover some general working remotely tips, and then go on to go through some quick power tips and then a walkthrough of the Microsoft Teams interface.

First, the Remote Workers Survival Guide

For a lot of people, you may be working from home for the first time and there are some useful tips for keeping productive and sane when working remotely.

Have a routine

It can be really easy to just get up late, stay in your PJs and maybe…

What we’re going to cover

In this tutorial, we’re going to cover installing Docker on Windows, enabling Kubernetes, installing helm and testing it all by running a machine learning notebook server. And then we’ll cover a few extras like docker-compose and Visual Studio Code Extensions.

Getting Started

Firstly the example environment I’m setting this up in has a normal internet connection (no complex proxy configuration) and is a 64-bit PC running a 64-bit copy of Windows 10 Pro with 4 cores and 16GB of RAM. Minimally you need around 8GB of RAM and 2 cores to be able to run anything sensible.

Pre Installed:

• Git for Windows…

There are a lot of providers offering cloud storage for businesses, they all use a REST API for access data objects. Some of them provide cheaper tiered storage for longer-term slower access storage or more redundant multi-region storage, but for a fair comparison, we will only consider their standard single region hot storage.

Cloud providers

• Amazon S3 — The defacto standard for cloud-based object storage. The S3 protocol being a common interface that multiple storage providers support. Using regional hot storage for comparison.
• Microsoft Azure — Microsoft’s cloud service, relatively new to the cloud market but has a significant number of regions…

If you look at the normal pay as you go pricing for many cloud providers you’ll find a pretty varied set of pricing. The big three Amazon, Azure and Google are all pretty similar with quite a large variation both higher and lower from the other smaller cloud providers.

To try and compare like for like across cloud providers I have used a machine configuration that all the considered cloud providers can supply using their online rate cards. i.e. 4 CPU cores and 16GB RAM. There will obviously be some performance differences between the configurations of different cloud providers, but…

If you’re like me, the few times you can get a serious amount of uninterrupted writing done is on holiday or sneaking off to a coffee shop for a few hours. To make the most of this time a travel writing setup is an excellent addition to your hand luggage, purse or man-bag.

My essentials consist of a good bluetooth keyboard, a mobile device stand, backup battery, and the ubiquotous smartphone. For the more advanced writing gadgets I have a budget e-ink tablet and a DEX adaptor.

The Keyboard

My bluetooth keyboard is the microsoft universal keyboard. It has an excellent key…

If you talk to most of my friends they will probably describe me as very calm, and I don’t let stress and anxiety get to me too much. Don’t get me wrong it’s is still there, some level of stress is part of the human condition is always going to have some impact on your life. My calm nature hasn’t always been there and the journey to get there wasn’t quick or easy.

The transformation happened for a couple of key reasons. Firstly I recognised that high levels of reactivity and stress aren’t a healthy or happy way to be…

We all read these articles about how big data is taking over the world. One of the tools widely used for this large scale data processing is Spark. Spark is a big data analytics agent and is the base framework of a lot of machine learning and data science used across the industry.

It’s all well and good doing data analysis projects with your Jupyter Notebook and Pandas, but if you want it to scale you need to design it a little differently. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know how to get the nuts and bolts actually set up on your…

We are all born with a curious nature, the world is new and wondrous. As we grow we start to see rich veins of knowledge and experiences stretching off in all directions. We learn, we explore, and we taste everything.

And then just as we are leaving adolescence and embarking on the journey into adulthood, it just sort of stops. In an everyday sense, we are all still curious, we consume stories, we consume news, we consume documentaries. But active pursuits of knowledge and that intellectual thirst for exploring new ideas tends to wain.

Look up and see the world around you

We are surrounded by media, content…