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Following are some resources referred to during the discussion, afterward in one-on-one chats, plus a few that I thought might be of interest for futher reading. As the panel turned out to be, these are mostly technical, with a few of interest to analyst types. I too wish that we had a bit more coverage of business case studies.

[Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems][marz]

Nathan Marz and James Warren (Manning Publications)

A wealth of insight on building an architecture employing multiple data stores in order to serve differing latency requirements, and hedge risks and weaknesses. Marz initially developed Apache Storm for Backtype, acquired by Twitter. Still in "Early Access Edition" status, but all chapters are now available. If you're not technical but you'd like an introduction to the technical considerations, [Marz's post that led to the book][marz cap] is a briefer overview.

[Questioning the Lambda Architecture][kreps lambda]

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# Lighter -- Campfire from the command line
# usage: ruby lighter.rb subdomain "Main Room" macournoyer@gmail
require "rubygems"
require "tinder"
require "readline"
require "highline/import"

class Lighter
  def initialize(room)
    @room = room

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# Neater Github gem dependencies for Rails

module GithubGem
  def github_gem(gem_name, opts={})
    lib_name = gem_name.split('-', 2)[1]
    self.gem gem_name, {:lib => lib_name, :source => 'http://gems.github.com'}.merge(opts)
  end
end

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

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usage = <<DESC
Use mysql to expire sessions without loading the Rails environment, so we
can call this task from cron without it being unnecessarily expensive.

Takes path to Rails app and desired RAILS_ENV as arguments.
DESC

namespace :db do
  namespace :sessions do
    desc usage

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namespace :db do
  desc 'Open a MongoDB console with connection parameters for the current Rails.env'
  task :console => :environment do
    conn = Mongoid.master.connection
    args = []
    args << "--username=#{conn.username}" if conn.username rescue nil
    args << "--password=#{conn.password}" if conn.password rescue nil
    args << "--host=#{conn.host}"
    args << "--port=#{conn.port.to_s}"
    args << Mongoid.master.name

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# Basic tagging system for mongoid documents.
# jpemberthy 2010
#
#  class User
#    include Mongoid::Document
#    include Mongoid::Document::Taggable
#  end
# 
#  @user = User.new(:name => "Bobby")
#  @user.tag_list = "awesome, slick, hefty"      

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# Nice idea from:
#   http://kpumuk.info/ruby-on-rails/my-top-7-rspec-best-practices/
#
#   ~/test$ rake -T spec:suite
#
#   (in /Users/kpumuk/test)
#   rake spec:suite:acl     # Run all specs in access control spec suite
#   rake spec:suite:amazon  # Run all specs in Amazon libraries spec suite

SPEC_SUITES = [

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# TextMate added these variables to cope with changes in ERB handling
# in different versions of Rails -- for instance, Rails 3 automatically
# strips whitespace so that it's no longer necessary to use a form like
# <% end -%>, but if you're still maintaining Rails 2 projects, you
# can't omit the minus sign and get the same behavior.
#
# The following regex replace substitutes the function below for the
# TextMate variable references after the snippets are converted:
#
#   /\v\$\{(TM_RAILS_TEMPLATE_([^_]+)_RUBY_([^_\s]+))\}/`!p textmate_var('\1', snip)`/g

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# encoding: utf-8
module Mongoid #:nodoc:
  module Associations #:nodoc:
    module EmbeddedCallbacks

      # bubble callbacks to embedded associations
      def run_callbacks(kind, *args, &block)
        # now bubble callbacks down
        self.associations.each_pair do |name, meta|
          if meta.association == Mongoid::Associations::EmbedsMany

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SciPy, PyQt and Matplotlib on OS X Snow Leopard

The squeeky-clean way with homebrew and pip/virtualenv.

$ easy_install pip
$ pip install virtualenvwrapper mercurial
$ brew install gfortran && brew install pyqt
# Have a nice long coffee break -- compiling Qt took 67 minutes on my

quad-core i7 MBP, PyQt another 8.