Ryan Robitaille

Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s Data. Realtime, Social, Contextual Data. But, if you want to do any real trending, data mining, post-processing, or even simple analysis on it – you really need to be making a historical record of what you’re looking for and store it in a usable way. I will show you how to create SQL Server tables and use a simple Python script to pull out tweets and save them for future analysis.

It’s interesting, the types of data conversations you have with people when discussing a unique project like MetallicAnalysis. You’re trying to show things in a different way and get as deep as possible, BUT never want to get too lame or “tech-y”, else it loses contact with the actual subject matter and begins to make less sense. Numbers are cool, but numbers that ACTUALLY FUCKING MEAN SOMETHING to the average fan / person are way cooler…

Just a recent article I wrote for the C&C Computer Solutions site / blog. Great stuff. Here’s a bit of the intro, but for the MEAT of it, you’ll have to go to the C&C site and read it yourself…

Anyone who has ever dealt with the mortgage software package “Encompass” from Ellie Mae – from any kind of support / IT standpoint knows the pain. It just… well, doesn’t behave as you would assume. Seemingly simple things (from an integration / workflow standpoint) just don’t play nice, help in the web forums is laughable, [...]

Business Intelligence. I hate the term as an IT buzzword. So sick of hearing Business Intelligence-this, Business Intelligence-that, Business Intelligence-expert-my-ass. But, hate it or not “Business Intelligence” shiz isn’t going anywhere – in fact, its been here in one way, shape, or form since the first caveman traded a sharp rock for some unsanctioned cave-nookie.

A few months ago, I showed how you can do simple back and forth ETL task with python scripts – this time I’m going to take it one step further and show how with an extra python module we can actually export data to a usable Excel format as well. I often use this method [...]