Integration design in a serverless world
My first program was a PRG file with BASIC code, stored in a magnetic cassette. Using a datasette, the program was load into RAM and executed by the C64’s CPU. Fast forward to today, once you have a working code, […]
What is your tech stack?
“in programming, the stack refers to a “last in, first out” data structure – you can think of it as a collection of different pieces of software” What is ‘stack’ and why should you care? We usually ask for your […]
Data lakes power UIs, not engineers
“Data (…) is typically stored in a distributed file store that can hold high volumes of large files in various formats. This kind of store is often called a data lake.” Big data architectures Big data architectures are often designed backward: […]
Most valuable code
Software is made of building blocks: either an inspired engineer wrote a rules-based engine from scratch, re-used an existing library, or connected and configured the right AWS services. At some point, those building blocks will become obsolete and in need […]
The schemaless myth
Each advertising channel has a data model. They all seem to share the “campaign > ad group > ad” hierarchy, but the attributes and stats are different. So tired of running alter tables in RDBM databases, developers saw NoSQL schemaless […]
Use SimpleDB for your Saved Reports
AWS SimpleDB is perfect for creating indexes and save small objects. Since it’s a NoSQL database, you can save game sessions with different attributes per user, or keeping inventory (and searching through) a large collection of s3 folders/files. In the […]
Big data, Real-time, Machine Learning
In Ad Tech (as it is happening in other industries), we are dealing with three major technical challenges: 1) How to deal with huge amounts of data. 2) How to deal with different sources, and multiple data models, in real-time. […]
Moving fast vs. Future-proof
If you are using 90% of your engineering capacity fixing bugs, it is tempting to think that you need to throw away your product and build a future-proof platform. Let’s suppose that you’ve achieved that technological nirvana: you have a […]
Entities in a cross-channel analytics platform
Indivisible, identifiable, real or abstract, globally unique objects are called entities in the data modeling reign. If you plan to store them in a relational database, you will create one table for each. In a NoSQL database, one index. In […]
Where is your advertising server?
Unless you are OpenX or DoubleClick, you don’t own the ad servers. You are using third-party servers from channels like Facebook or Google. Using third-party ad servers also means you are pulling stats data using the channel’s Ads API. Not […]