Let’s Light this Candle
I never thought I’d say this, but I feel like an astronaut. More precisely, I imagine that I am in some small way experiencing what Sheppard felt waiting for launch. Like Sheppard, I’ve been on standby for a long time (thankfully it’s not I but rather my adorable baby boy who’s doing the pants-wetting), and like Sheppard I’ve recently grown anxious to get moving again. I had a bit of a frustrating start the past few days as I tried to work my way through the details of IGFS setup, but this morning I took a really productive step back.
In my project management class last night, we discussed our results from the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire which helped me understand that my approach to understanding Ignite was all wrong! According to the framework of this questionnaire, a person is either sequential or global in how he or she comes to understand concepts. A sequential learner would follow the step-by-step approach laid out in my text book toward a solid understanding of the overall concept demonstrated along the way. On the other extreme is where the questionnaire firmly placed me. As a global learner, it’s better to approach a new topic with a wide-angle lense. Once I see the big picture, I’m then able to fit the details into context. Until I get this big picture, I’m not really able to make heads or tails of the details, which is largely what I have been experiencing the last few days. Classification as a global learner really rings true to me, helping me make sense of a lot of my past experiences learning (and not learning) concepts and hopefully guiding me in how to make progress in my future endeavors. I’m going to try stepping away from the details of implementation and resume my efforts to place Ignite in the broader context. There are other learning dimensions that are important for me to consider and suggest, for example, that I naturally learn in fits and starts, but I’ll aim for steady progress for now ;)
The ultimate goal of this semester, and of any M.S. thesis, is to gather some good data in order to test a hypothesis. I look forward to working out the details of my next experiments, but I’m not quite there yet. I plan to spend the next few weeks gaining a firm understanding of how Ignite fits into the broader context of alternative approaches and competing technologies designed to solve related problems. Armed with this global understanding, I expect that the finer-grained details of specific use cases and the implementation details that I’ll need to work out to design good experiments will fall into place more easily.
All that to say, here is my near-term plan:
- Week 1 - Place Ignite in context
- OLAP v. OLTP
- DSM v. Spark
- Week 2 - Place related work / competition in context
- current HTAP technologies
- Week 3 - Summarize Ignite use cases & resume IGFS setup
- Week 4 - Identify our demo use cases & finish IGFS setup
- Week 5+ - Build pipelines & gather data