James Ward (www.jamesward.com) is a Principal Platform Evangelist at Salesforce.com. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80’s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90’s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. In 2011 James became a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com where he taught developers how to deploy apps on the cloud with Heroku. From Fall 2012 to Spring 2014 James was a Developer Advocate at Typesafe where he created Typesafe Activator and led the Reactive Software vision. James tweets as @_JamesWard and posts code at github.com/jamesward.
Machine Learning is all the rage today with many different options and paradigms. This session will walk through the basics of Machine Learning and show how to get started with the open source Spark ML framework. Through Scala code examples you will learn how to build and deploy learning systems like recommendation engines.
Apache Kafka has emerged as a next generation event streaming system to connect our distributed systems through fault tolerant and scalable event-driven architectures. Now open source through Apache, Kafka is being used by numerous large enterprises for a variety of use cases. This session will introduce the basics of Kafka and walk through some code examples that will show how to begin using it.
