The Anaconda team had a blast at this year’s Strata + Hadoop World in NYC. We’re really excited about the interest and discussions around Open Data Science! For those of you that weren’t able to attend, here’s a quick recap of what we presented.
Three Anaconda team members - including myself - took the stage at Strata to chat all things Python, Anaconda and Open Data Science on Hadoop. For my presentation, I wanted to hit home the idea that Open Data Science is the foundation of modernization for the enterprise, and that open source communities can create powerful technologies for data science. I also touched upon the core challenge of open data science in the enterprise. Many people think data science is the same thing as software development, but that’s a very common misconception. Business tend to misinterpret the Python language and pigeonhole it, saying it competes with Java, C#, Ruby, R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS, or BI systems - which is not true. Done right, Python can be an extremely powerful force across any given business.
I then jumped into an overview of Anaconda for Data Science in Hadoop, highlighting how much Modern Data Science teams use Anaconda to drive more intelligent decisions - from the business analyst to the data scientist to the developer to the data engineer to DevOps. Anaconda truly powers these teams and gives businesses the superpowers required to change the world. To date, Anaconda has seen nearly 8 million downloads, and that number is growing everyday. You can see my slides from this talk, ‘Open Data Science on Hadoop in the Enterprise,’ here.
We also ran some really awesome demos at the Anaconda booth, including examples of Anaconda Enterprise, Dask, datashader, and more. One of our most popular demos was Ian Stokes-Rees’ demonstration of SAS and Open Data Science using Jupyter and Anaconda. For many enterprises that currently use SAS, there is not a clear path to Open Data Science. To embark on the journey to Open Data Science, enterprises need an easy on-boarding path for their team to use SAS in combination with Open Data Science. Ian showcased why Anaconda is an ideal platform that embraces both open source and legacy languages, including Base SAS, so that enterprise teams can bridge the gap by leveraging their current SAS expertise while ramping up on Open Data Science.
You can see his notebook from the demo here, and you can download his newest episode of Fresh Data Science discussing the use of Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks with SAS and Python here.
In addition to my talk and our awesome in-booth demos, two of our software engineers, Bryan Van de Ven and Sarah Bird, demonstrated how to build intelligent apps in a week with Bokeh, Python and optimization. Attendees of the sessions learned how to create standard and custom visualizations using Bokeh, how to make them interactive, how to connect that interactivity with their Python stacks, and how to share their new interactive data applications. Congratulations to both on a job well done.
All that being said, we can’t wait to see you at next year’s Strata + Hadoop! Check back here for details on more upcoming conferences we’re attending.