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Customer Loyalty – Starting a stampercard: Part 1. #customerloyalty #stampcard #coffee #tea #loyalty #retail #cafe #restaurants
Sometimes the simplest solutions work the best and the stamp card is the easiest way to establish a form of repeat business. The idea is simple, have a card with spaces for nine or ten transactions, where stamps or a pen signature can be applied. Once the card is complete the customer then receives a…
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Dealing With Imposter Syndrome on Panels – #impostersyndrome #beltech2020 #ai #machinelearning #conferences
Thirty-two years into this industry and this was possibly the first time that imposter syndrome didn’t hit me five minutes before the start of the panel. If you are doing a talk and it’s you and you alone, then that’s okay. You’ve put the work in, got the slides sorted, rehearsed(!) and when you stand…
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Extending Topic Retention in Kafka – #kafka #apachekafka #confluent
There’s a part in my internal body clock that worries about Kafka messages, especially production Kafka messages, especially LOSING Kafka messages…. Even when I know that the retention policies work perfectly well and do as they are told I still wake up and worry. If you maintain a Kafka cluster then you’ll understand. When it…
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Three Things Retailers Can Do Right Now – #COVID-19 #retail #ecommerce #startups #fashion #restaurants #fastfood #bricksandmortar
Retailers are feeling the impact of COVID-19 as the landscape of how people move, interact and generally get on with day-to-day life. The ones I’ve been talking to have seen drastic falls in footfall and takings. As you can assume, they are naturally worried. For the first time ever I managed to enter and exit…
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The National Trust and the Travelling Salesperson – #TSP #Data #NationalTrust @NationalTrustNI #R #RLang
I’ve not had to change much of my routine when it comes to self isolation, I work from home anyways. Saying that with all my speaking engagements cancelled (and rightly so) my brain needed something else to do….. The Travelling Salesperson problem has fascinated me for years but I’ve never had the time to really…
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Machine Learning Hands On 2nd edition now available. #machinelearning #ai #java #kafka #clojure #weka #dl4j #spark #r
Towards the end of February the author copies of the second edition of my book, Machine Learning: Hands-on for developers and technical professionals landed on my desk. I’m very happy with the way it’s turned out. I’ve spend the last few months resting, asides from the day job at Digitalis.io – the plan was to…
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So tell me about the 94.75%…. #startups #business #IgniteNI #Propel
I’ve been contacted by a few people who seem rather insistent I crawl out of my grumpy cave as I’m not really commenting on things and haven’t done for most of the year. I took the bait…. I fell for it. You can read the full story and list of startups here. A Big Whacking…
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Machine Learning book update…. #ai #machinelearning #java #clojure #kafka #dl4j #weka #spark
The first draft of the second edition is complete and a lot of the editing work is done. There are a couple of big changes…. SpringXD has now been replaced with Kafka and how to perform self training machine learning models (with Neural Networks, Linear Regression and Decision Trees). The chapter on Spark got a…
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A Little Gotcha in Luminus request in Layout Renders….. #clojure #webdev #luminus
It’s been a while since I looked at the Luminus web development framework for Clojure. I know some folk find it a bit too heavy but I really like it. There have been some changes in releases since I built DeskHoppa so I though I better leave it here incase someone else gets confused by…
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Adding file logging to Kafka Connect – #Kafka #Connect #Streaming #Data #Devops
More of a memory aid for me as I’ll forget….. Kafka Connect’s default logging goes to the console, I prefer tailing and grepping files instead. I’m using Confluent Kafka 5.1.2 but the file locations will be pretty much similar if you are using the Apache version. Open up the connect-log4.properties file in $KAFKA_HOME/etc/kafka directory. Add…