The first step in answering any Big Data-oriented question is to simply obtain the data. If you're lucky, you already have it. Perhaps your company already captures significant data to answer the question that's been posed, or at least can capture it themselves once you begin doing so. The next

Most office-workers will spend the majority of their adult life in the office -- about 47 hours a week if you're an American. Because of this, the majority of a person's carbon footprint will happen there, assuming they don't live in a coal power plant. Without a proper kitchen, most

It was that time of year again -- sitting around the table with extended family, enjoying an assortment of homemade goodies. With the polite conversation and well tempered jokes, there's a series of questions one grows to expect. "How have you been?", "How's work?", or for

In my article Why an Address is NOT a String, we discussed the complexity added when you store your address as a single string. Since then, I've discovered another, slightly worse way of storing addresses: As a series of strings. When you store an address as a single field, you

At Ippon Technologies USA, we're lucky enough to have "Coding Dojos" every 2-4 months. Every programmer takes a day off project to sit down together and learn something new. As I have already been learning Big Data, I was particularly excited for this month's dojo. It was on

Nick Peterson and Justin Risch have begun to study Big Data, Spark, Hadoop, and the technologies that permeate that environment. This is both a recount of their first experiences working with these technologies, as well as an example to help define the process for those looking to learn Big Data

Hipchat API While Atlassian offers great tutorials and quick set ups for making a plugin, I found it personally difficult to find all the documents specifically related to making a Java based plugin. Much of the documentation is either not related to Java, or requires you to know the basics

As I outlined in the latter half of my last blog post, there’s a really fast way to tell how close two coordinates are on the earth. I later wrote an algorithm based on these “closeness” methods to determine if two addresses are the same, allowing a buffer zone,

Applying the concepts of Data Meaningfulness and Usefulness. One example given in the article [Data Usability by Susannah Darling](http://www.ipponusa.com/blog/data-meaningfulness-and-usability-does-your-data-mean-what-it-says/) was that addresses should be stored as two Doubles representing a physical location (coordinates) rather than a String; let’s explore that further together. Comparing

If you were to boil down Ippon to its raw ingredients, and sifted for what makes us unique and successful, what would you find? We asked some of our clients what made them choose us, and here are some of our most sought after qualities! Diversity, with shared values Ippon

Recently, Tatami received a massive overhaul thanks to our partnership with VCU and their team of senior computer science students. Though the app worked beautifully, there were inefficiencies that needed to be addressed. Being halfway through transitioning from Backbone to Angular JS meant that there was more bloat than acceptable–

In 1995, a new way of programming was born. James Gosling, working for Sun Systems, had done as all great inventors do– he tried something completely new. Originally he called it Oak, but it wasn’t long until it became Java. Though certainly not the Java we know today, it

Recently, Tatami received a massive overhaul thanks to our partnership with VCU and their team of senior computer science students. Unfortunately, being halfway through transitioning from Backbone to AngularJS means that, though the app worked beautifully, there were inefficiencies that needed to be addressed. This happens anytime an app is

We are excited to announce that our 4.0 AngularJS version of Tatami is live! For those of you unfamiliar, Tatami is our in-house, open source web application that allows businesses to have their own, internal social network designed for collaboration, communication, and team building. Besides hosting your own Tatami