Christmas is just around the corner, and we hope you will be able to spend this important time with your loved ones. This year has been different and challenging for many, and we hope 2021 will bring nothing but success to your business and teams.
As we wrap up 2020, we would like to reflect on how we met a year full of challenges with compassion, focus, encouragement, and backing we have received from our clients, stakeholders, and partners. In this blog, we wanted to share with you the key highlights of the incredible ride that we’ve had in the past year.
Here is a snapshot of Knoldus Highlights 2020
A growing team
We might be geographically dispersed, but we are a close-knit group of people here at Knoldus. That hasn’t changed despite the team increasing in size over the course of 2020. Lockdown was no barrier to welcoming our new colleagues onboard, as we all share the same virtual workplace experience.
We’ve worked hard to build and nurture that team dynamic, despite the obvious challenges and the limited opportunities to meet face to face. Of course there have been regular calls and online meetings with Smartsheets and virtual meeting rooms on Google Chat and Zoom have proved invaluable.
However, the key to team building is to make sure it is not all work, work, work. We’ve devoted a few hours to team events that included everything from virtual horse racing to a Halloween quiz to online exercise classes. We were also lucky enough to be able to fit in one team meal in London before the second lockdown.
Turning a negative into a positive
Proactively promoting remote working has done more than just blunt the impact of the various lockdown restrictions that have been in place this year. It has actually delivered some positive results. On average, each team member has saved one hour per day that would have been spent commuting. When you extend that across the team, it works out at more than 400 hours saved this year, just by working from home.
Those are hours we have been able to dedicate to developing our technology, working with our clients and increasing our knowledge and learnings
Here are our most popular resources of 2020
TOP WEBINARS THIS YEAR
For enterprise organizations, getting machine learning (ML) models to production and scaling use cases in the business has been a significant challenge. It is estimated that only about 12% of ML models make it to production environments today.
In this webinar we discussed best practices of ML workflow. MLOps not only bring ML models to the market faster but also maintain the quality and integrity of those models. Watch now
Along with the need to manage ever-increasing volumes of data, reliably, in close to real-time, we need to move from traditional stateless, behavior-driven services and high latency, batch-oriented data processing to stateful, data-driven services and low latency, stream-oriented data processing.
In this webinar, Akka Experts from Knoldus and Lightbend took a fresh look at how Akka Cluster Sharding helps you to develop, deploy, and manage cloud-native services in a stateless environment. Watch now
As “big data” becomes increasingly ubiquitous and important to a variety of organizations, many of the existing database systems and platforms have become too cumbersome to set up and maintain. On-site systems can be complex and difficult to scale, and other “big data” solutions require constant tuning and administrators with the knowledge on how to do so.
With Snowflake, there is no trade-off between scalability and productivity. It lets you focus more on using your data rather than managing the system your data lives in. Watch this webinar to learn more about Snowflake and how it interacts. Watch Now
MOST POPULAR EBOOK
Forecasting: Modern AI-driven collaborative forecasting
In this eBook, you will understand how the Guided Analytics application using Knime Platform combines just the right amount of automation and interaction for a specific set of problems.
Our solution to an interactive Forecasting system assists the business analyst in their quest to find new insights in data and predict future outcomes by generating more useful analysis, easily generate single visualizations, as well as an interactive dashboard to explore complex data. Get if from here: https://www.knoldus.com/learn/resources/ebooks/forecasting-modern-ai-driven
TOP KNOLX SESSION THIS YEAR
Last year, Apache Spark voted in favor of including Property Graphs and its query language Cypher as a core component of Spark 3.0. But before that, Morpheus or Cypher for Apache Spark (CAPS) added the same capabilities to a Spark workflow, but as an external plugin. This session introduces Property graphs and explains how Cypher language can be used to query the graph database. Also, we’ll see how to add and use Morpheus as a plugin in the spark application. Watch Now – https://youtu.be/zwp_9uMwSrU
In the session, we discussed the End-to-end working of Apache Spark that mainly focused on “Why What and How” factors. We discussed RDDs and the high-level API like Dataframe, Dataset. The session also took care of the internals of Spark. Watch Now: https://youtu.be/auqXgTYdtMk
Knime is a drag and drop-based platform that allows its users to focus on the data in hand and how to transform it, without worrying about the way to code that transformation. In this session, we explained how to create a workflow for Customer Segmentation and deploy it as an application on the Knime server. https://youtu.be/FObbfjlIVI8
MOST VIEWED BLOG THIS YEAR:
Spark, one of the most successful projects in the Apache Software Foundation, is evolving day by day as a market leader for Big Data processing. Along with the many advantages and features that make it a powerful Big Data tool, there are some essential features missing from Spark. ACID Transactions is one of Them. We will see what ACID means for Spark and whether spark really accommodates it or not. Read Here: https://blog.knoldus.com/spark-acid-compliant-or-not/
Dotty is the project name for technologies that are considered for inclusion in Scala 3. Scala has pioneered the fusion of object-oriented and functional programming in a typed setting. Scala 3 will be a big step towards realizing the full potential of these ideas. In this blog, we explore how we can quickly start with the Dotty compiler with the example code. Read Here: https://blog.knoldus.com/a-beginner-guide-to-scala-3-0/
- Different ways of Handling Exceptions in CompletableFutures:
CompletableFuture is an implementation of the Future interface but with a modern twist. It takes advantage of functional operations to promote asynchronous/event-driven programming models. In this blog, we will explore how we can handle exceptions in the different computing stages when we use CompletableFuture. Read Here: https://blog.knoldus.com/different-ways-of-handling-exceptions-in-completablefutures/
Strategic Partnerships this year
Through our partnerships, we have an unwavering commitment to equipping your organization with the knowledge, skills, expertise, resources, and tools to succeed.
We are excited about our latest partnership with Knime. KNIME is an open-source data analytics, reporting and integration platform. With this you can build software to create and productionize data science and machine learning using one easy and intuitive environment, enabling every stakeholder in the data science process to focus on what they do best. Knoldus has partnered with KNIME to provide global brands with a new means to maximize the value of their data with machine learning and AI.
We are proud of another partnership with Snowflake. Snowflake is the only data platform built for the cloud for all your data and all your users. It offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed “data warehouse-as-a-service”.
This year, we also announced our partnership with DAML. DAML is an open-source programming language for writing distributed applications quickly, concisely, and correctly. It runs on the leading blockchain platforms.
We had our fair share of appreciations and compliments
Knoldus thrives on feedback and learning. We received approximately 1500+ appreciation and compliments, be it from our clients or team members and that’s how we stay motivated.
Celebrating festivals and occasions during the COVID-19 restrictions
When many of the world’s countries went into lockdown in the spring it was difficult to forecast the future. However, one thing that many people pinned their hopes on was that life would return to some semblance of normality for the festivities that are to take place at the latter end of the year. People found a new way to celebrate these festivals – being live-streamed on Zoom, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
Knoldus also didn’t leave any opportunity to celebrate, be it festivals or the success of our work and team engagement in the lockdown.
- Lohri: The festival of Lohri is also known as the harvest festival and marks the end of the winter season. Knoldus celebrated Lohri with a dash of fun and frolic.
- Knoldus Foundation Day: At Knoldus, we live in a culture of happiness, caring, and appreciation. A culture that deserves celebration when the event is as special as celebrating the date of our inception. We celebrated the 8th Annual Day, where we celebrated our Achievements and Wins. Here’s what it looks like when we come together to laugh, dance, and share the happy times that went by.
- Women’s Day: Led by Passion, Creativity, and Determination, women are not only curating a profitable future for themselves but for others too. To celebrate the enthusiasm of Women, all of us at Knoldus listen out what Women’s Day means to Knoldus’ Women
- Diwali: This year at Diwali, we have added sparkle to Knolder’s Diwali shopping through an Amazon voucher. And Knolders bought various beautiful gifts for themselves and for their loved ones and made them feel special by giving them a surprise worth true happiness.
- Children’s Day: we celebrated #ChildrensDay where we encourage young minds to foster the spirit of innovation and design. They express their thoughts and feelings with beautiful drawings. Inspiring your child to be creative develops a wide range of skills while building confidence.
- Employee Engagement Activities: We urged Knolders to get creative during the lockdown and express their sentiments while we are going through these difficult times. We were amazed and delighted to see their creativity through their dancing, music drawings & writings.
We also have lots of other activities apart from these
SHARE YOUR OPINION ON SCALA 3.0
If you’re planning to relax with some Tech materials this holiday season, then we’ve got your tech fix right here. Share your opinions on SCALA 3.0 and get a chance to win Echo Show 8 – Smart display with Alexa – 8″ HD screen with stereo sound.
Dotty Project or Scala 3 is on the horizon, and Knoldus wants to explore new directions that will benefit and excite technology users. The purpose of this brief survey is to find out what is your experience as a developer, your expectations for Scala 3, and your view on the future of Scala.
Take this survey over the holiday break and Enjoy – https://forms.gle/KkjmgjCHMTMZ7dYw5
What’s Next? Looking Ahead to 2021
2020 has kicked us into full gear, and our drive to increase product engineering will not slow down. We have big plans for the new year — new products, new learnings, and some big celebrations. Until then, stay safe and keep coding.
We wish you a happy, safe and peaceful holiday season and look forward to a successful and prosperous 2021.
Very insightful