Christian Hollinger

Software Engineering, GNU/Linux, Data, ML, and other things

25 Apr 2021

Raspberry Pi Gardening: Monitoring a Vegetable Garden using a Raspberry Pi - Part 1

5,156 words, ~20 min read

On how growing vegetables is more complicated than it looks, why bad soldering still works, on moving individual bits around, and what I learned about using technology where one probably does not need technology.
28 Feb 2021

Bad Data and Data Engineering: Dissecting Google Play Music Takeout Data using Beam, go, Python, and SQL

3,464 words, ~13 min read

On the joy of inheriting a rather bad dataset - dissecting ~120GB of terrible Google Takeout data to make it usable, using Dataflow/Beam, go, Python, and SQL.
21 Dec 2020

Why I use Linux

3,117 words, ~12 min read

One question I do get in earnest quite frequently is why I put up with running GNU/Linux distributions for development work. An attempt at a simple response.
26 Sep 2020

RE: Throw Away Code? Use go, not Python or Rust!

2,237 words, ~8 min read

Responding to an article on using Rust for throw away code and prototyping: Making a case for go over Rust, Python, and perl.
06 Jul 2020

A Data Engineering Perspective on Go vs. Python (Part 2 - Dataflow)

6,579 words, ~26 min read

In Part 2 of our comparison of Python and go from a Data Engineering perspective, we'll finally take a look at Apache Beam and Google Dataflow and how the go SDK and the Python SDK differ, what drawbacks we're dealing with, how fast it is by running extensive benchmarks, and how feasible it is to make the switch
11 Jun 2020

A Data Engineering Perspective on Go vs. Python (Part 1)

3,807 words, ~15 min read

Exploring golang - can we ditch Python for go? And have we finally found a use case for go? Part 1 explores high-level differences between Python and go and gives specific examples on the two languages, aiming to answer the question based on Apache Beam and Google Dataflow as a real-world example.
21 May 2020

Goodbye, WordPress - Hello, Hugo & nginx

1,925 words, ~7 min read

Ditching WordPress for a static site generator
25 Feb 2020

How a broken memory module hid in plain sight

1,561 words, ~6 min read

How a broken memory module hid in plain sight – and how I blamed the Linux Kernel and two innocent hard drives
09 Dec 2019

Tensorflow on edge, or – Building a “smart” security camera with a Raspberry Pi

1,886 words, ~7 min read

The amount of time my outdoor cameras are being set off by light, wind, cars, or anything other than a human is insane. Overly cautious security cameras might be a feature, but an annoying one at that...
07 Aug 2019

How I built a (tiny) real-time Telematics application on AWS

2,938 words, ~11 min read

In 2017, I wrote about how to build a basic, Open Source, Hadoop-driven Telematics application (using Spark, Hive, HDFS, and Zeppelin) that can track your movements while driving, show you how your driving skills are, or how often you go over the speed limit - all without relying on 3rd party vendors processing and using that data on your behalf...