For the last two years I’ve been working with the Twython package to build my (R2D2) Twitter Bot. It’s been successful and I’ve learned how to hack Python better than I ever did before. Now I’m setting my sites on building a Twitter Bot using Groovy Script. Why Groovy Script? Groovy is a lot like Python in the sense that it’s a dynamic programming language. It can be used everywhere, easily, because of the JVM. Plus, I always wanted to teach myself Java so I thought this is a good way to get started. ...

This is my first stab at trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO here. A doodle/sketch just seems the fastest in this case. Update I have since given a lot of thought to SEO on this blog as I migrated it from one CMS to another. Each CMS handles SEO in a completely different manner and over time the migrations have had, in some way, a damaging effect here. Perhaps the right thing to do is to pick one CMS and stick with it through thick and thin. That’s something really hard to do for someone like me, but I consider these migrations to be a learning opportunity. ...

First off this is not a political post but I will come out and say it. Make America Great Again is a stupid slogan. I admit there are problems with the middle class but America is and will continue to be great. Why? Because of what I wrote two years ago. It’s as relevant today as it was back then. Startup Land Two years ago I wrote a LinkedIn article on a train ride home titled “I believe in America.” I was trying to be cute, tying in a Godfather movie reference in there to make a catchy title. I had just spent a few days at the CIC building in Cambridge, MA and just utterly overwhelmed with inspiration. The CIC building is a incubator with every floor bursting at the seams with startups. Even reading what I wrote two years ago still gives me goose bumps. ...

Below is an integrated post of my Blot Tutorials. It’s a small list but appears to be useful to some Blot users. Blot.Im is a neat Dropbox/Github to blog static generator which I fancied for a while. I still like it but it’s not as mature as Hugo but it has promise. It definately is easy to drop images into a folder and it creates a blog post from it, so if you like super easy of use, then try out Blot. ...

What’s not surprising is that my readers come from all over the world. The map below are where they came from in the first half of 2016. The majority of them came from the USA, followed by Europe, and then Asia. This does not come as a surprise and makes complete sense because the users were searching for RapidMiner Tutorials. As a continuation to my previous post, I’m still sleuthing through my Google Analytics data trying to understand what is happening and why. Mostly I want to figure out a strategy so I can succeed in my “roll of film quest” but if yesterday’s post was an indicator, my quest is off to a rough start! ...

I’ve been going through a massive blog post purge and deciding which posts to keep or trash. Why? I have so many posts that were like Tweets, short and meaningless. They just bogged down my performance and really provided my readers with zero information. This blog started dying at the beginning of 2020, Google made some Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes and my blog started dropping like a rock. There were 100’s of similar blogs that were ranking better because they knew how to play the SEO game and I didn’t. So I decided to put a stop to it. ...

I have news. I’ve been mulling around the idea for this post for the last two years, ever since I joined RapidMiner. The journey at RapidMiner has been and continues to be fantastic. In those short two years I’ve worn many hats there, I started as a Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant, then moved to a Sales Engineer role, and now I’m Marketing Data Scientist. I’ve made the move from Sales to Marketing and my chips remain all in. ...

Long time readers know that I’ve struggled with blogging platforms for a long time. I finally opted for a static post approach because it’s safer than the PHP code injections that Wordpress suffers (suffered?) from. The bonus side of platforms like Wordpress is that they have 1000’s of great plugins to download and turbo charge your blog. I really liked this but I got tired of having my PHP templates “code injected” with spam attacks. ...

I think it was back in 2010 when I met up with an old high school classmate. Let’s call her “T,” and she was in between marketing jobs. I reached out to her because we had an opening for a CMO at my old engineering firm and thought she would be great for it. She had recently worked on some really cool NGO campaigns and I liked her forward thinking. I eventually convinced her to throw her hat in the ring for the CMO gig but that’s not the most important thing I learned from our get together. ...

Recently RapidMiner kicked off a new program called Office Hours. Every Wednesday a product expert will show off something cool they created with RapidMiner. This lasts for about 20 minutes and viewers can ask quesitons via Twitter. I recently did one on Advanced ETL techniques which you can watch here. I’m embedding last week’s Office Hours by our own Dr. Puente, which was fantastic. I really loved how he mashed up RapidMiner, R, and Python in one single workflow! It’s a must watch if you’re looking to use the best of the open source world in one single platform! ...