October Presentation Night - Sponsored by McGraw Hill

Thanks to our sponsor McGraw Hill for pizza and beer. They are hiring for sr. positions within a Spark/kafka/parquet/postgres stack. Please introduce yourself to them at the meetup or reach out on the slack workspace.

Our Speakers: Johnathan Fisher & Kyle Urquhart from Wayfair.
Bio
> Johnathan Fisher has programmed as a hobby for the past 10 years and recently decided to break into the industry and make a career of it. Previously working in the IT industry, he has been with Wayfair since 2017 and has been at the forefront of adopting frameworks such as Spark for his team’s workflow.

Summary
> His talk will be about the challenges faced and goals achieved when creating a batch scoring application using Airflow and Spark. The project made use of PySpark initially and Java Spark currently thus the talk will include some of the decisions in making the switch and lessons learned.

Bio
> Kyle has been working with Wayfair since 2016 after graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Central Florida, and has been applying spark to Wayfair’s event based systems to solve problems in the adtech space.

Summary
> His talk will be focused on an event replay system that uses spark, hadoop, and kafka to replay events in the past to help reprocess data in other systems.