Blogs|Oct 13, 2017

Top Free Data Science Books

There are probably thousands upon thousands of tutorials, articles, videos, and blog posts on all things data science on the internet now. Yet I’m still a big fan of books. Throughout history books have given wisdom, advice, and knowledge to everyone who wants to read them. Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, mentioned something similar: Men who…
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DevOps|Oct 10, 2017

Creating First-Run ARM Templates

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are a great solution for creating a repeatable environment. Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) makes  it easy to manage configurations, avoid dependency issues, and prevent server drift. Using IaC also means that you can recreate the environment as often as necessary to ensure it remains consistent. This gets complicated when…
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DevOps|Oct 5, 2017

Choosing Between Containers and Virtual Machines

Containers are simple, but harder to explain. Fundamentally, containers are a virtualization technology and they share a lot of common ground with virtual machines, however the biggest difference between the two is where the abstraction occurs. A VM hypervisor exposes a set of virtualized hardware components like a virtual network card, a virtual hard disk,…
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How To|Oct 2, 2017

Installing VSTS Build Agents on macOS

If you’re doing Xamarin, macOS (OS X), or iOS development work you’ve likely discovered that you need a way to automate the build of your code from Visual Studio Team Services. If you’re not familiar with setting up a private build agent macOS, the installation instructions provided by Microsoft can be a bit confusing. This…
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Mixed Reality|Sep 21, 2017

Getting Started with the New Acer Mixed Reality Headset

Introduction At Wintellect, we’ve been doing more and more work recently with Microsoft’s HoloLens device. But the HoloLens, at several thousand dollars, is an expensive proposition. Now Microsoft has broadened it’s strategy, rebranded it as “Windows Mixed Reality,” and has worked with hardware partners to come to market with an array of lower-priced headset options.…
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Blogs|Sep 12, 2017

Visualizing Sales Data in Python with Matplotlib

In our last post we interpreted a data set with pandas to gain some insights from it. In this post, we will do the same, but instead of interpreting the raw data we will use visualizations to help us determine patterns in the data. But before we dive into the implementation, let’s review the benefits…
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Engine
Blogs|Sep 11, 2017

Turbocharge WordPress With Docker

If you’ve ever dealt with WordPress, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not the fastest software out of the box. This is not inherently a problem with WordPress, as it is a complex app that runs on a cross platform technology. Performance of WordPress though can be improved with the combined effects of several small tweaks.…
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Tutorials|Sep 7, 2017

Creating Recoverable TFS Backups

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about the cloud software-as-a-service solutions is that it can reduce work. Although there’s still a need for IT, some tasks – such as performing backups – are provided by the vendor. If you’ve ever tried to backup a Team Foundation Server by hand, you have can…
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Blogs|Aug 28, 2017

Using Pandas to Analyze Sales Data

Now that we know how the data science process works, let’s leverage some of it and try to find insights into some data. We’ll be using pandas, a popular data analysis package for Python, to load and work with our data. Feel free to follow along by downloading the Jupyter notebook. If you went through…
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How To|Aug 24, 2017

Creating a Temporary Visual Studio Environment

Sometimes you will find that you need a cloud environment for working on a project. In some cases, you need the environment to perform a task that would take too long when you run it locally (for example, downloading a large file to transfer to Azure Blob Storage). Perhaps you need a mobile environment to…
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Blogs|Aug 21, 2017

Data Science and the Data Science Process

Before we get into the fun part of working with data, let’s break down how data science involves more than just statistics, why it’s becoming more important, and the data science process. Data Science vs. Statistics In short, data science is extracting knowledge from data. But how is that different between statistics? Data science encompasses…
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