Optimising geospatial queries with dynamic file pruning – deep dive!

We're back!

UPDATE It's been pointed out to me that a week's notice wasn't really very much , so we've moved this back to Nov 9th!

Hey everybody! I'm Rob, Engineering Manager @ Wejo. Chris Hyland has kindly allowed me to take over the running of this group, and my employer has offered to sponsor and host us! Now Covid is definitely past us (I've stopped checking the news so just assume it's all A-OK now) and a number of us are back to visiting the office at least a semi-regular basis, we thought it would be nice to have an actual in-person event.

While not everybody is ready for this yet, for those who do feel comfortable meeting up in real life we thought we'd start with a talk by our own Matt Slack who is a long-time member of the group so I'm sure many of you have met him before. There will be a cap of 30 RSVP's for this first event, so be aware it will be a little smaller a group than you're used to. If you RSVP yes and can no longer attend, please do update your RSVP!

Instead of a second talk, we'll make the most of all being in the same room for the first time in a while and host a group discussion with the topics chosen by the attendees. In the RSVP I've added a topic suggestion box, but don't worry – we'll also collect suggestions on the day!

We're planning on making this a regular event, on the second Tuesday of the month. We're confident we will be able to line-up some amazing guest speakers in the future too. So if you can't make this event don't worry, we'll see you at the next one!

## Agenda

– 6:00pm: Doors Open
– 6:30pm: Talk
– 7:15pm: Break / Pizza / Drinks / Networking
– 7:45pm: Discussion (Topics TBD)
– 8:30pm: Drinks / Networking
– 9:00pm: End

## Talk

Title: Optimising geospatial queries with dynamic file pruning – deep dive!
Speaker: Matt Slack, Head of Data Platform @ Wejo
Bio: Matt leads data strategy at Wejo, coming up with innovative ways of processing petabytes of connected car data, in both stream and batch, using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Kafka Streams and Akka. He is a strong advocate of Spark, having led on implementations of Cloudera and Databricks in his most recent roles. Matt can regularly be found leading Spark training sessions, or getting stuck into the latest performance tuning challenge.

## Discussion

If we're inundated with topic suggests we'll collect together them together on a whiteboard and use dot-voting to pick the suggestions to use. Hopefully this might give us a few topic ideas for future events too.

## Location

This event is hosted at our sponsors office:

Wejo Limited
ABC Building
21-23 Quay St
Manchester
M3 4AE

Upon arrival there will be people on reception to guide you up to the 7th floor (Protip, you need an access card to select Floor 7).

## Sponsor

Wejo is a leader in the connected car market and is shaping the future of mobility. The connected car space is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the internet of things industry. Car manufacturers are looking to extend traditional infotainment systems, insurers are seeking a better understanding of risk, users are demanding more feedback and firms are generating increasing amounts of data and require support in understanding its applications and value. We specialise in creating new services and products to help clients make the most of their data and realise its value.