How to Pack for a Backpacking Trip in Europe

Introduction In this blog post, I’ll give my thoughts on what to pack for a backpacking trip in Europe, supported by my recent experience. My friends and I recently did a 19-day backpacking trip in Europe from May 1st to May 19th, starting in Lisbon, Portugal and ending in Rome, Italy. These are all the cities we stayed in: Lisbon, Portugal Madrid, Spain Barcelona, Spain Marseille, France Monaco La Spezia, Italy Rome, Italy We typically stayed in cities for 2-3 days in Airbnbs, and travelled by train with an eurail™ pass....

May 22, 2023 · 6 min · 1171 words · Bradley Stevanus

Recursive Spark SQL

Spark is an efficient and easy-to-use framework for solving big data problems, and its Dataframe API allows solutions to be formatted in a familiar SQL syntax. However, the Dataframe API does not support the recursive SQL functionality, which is often used for a class of graph and tree algorithms. Let’s look at an example problem and how we might solve it using recursive SQL, and then think about how to translate this into a Spark program....

January 4, 2023 · 9 min · 1781 words · Bradley Stevanus