Today on the podcast, Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust share a great interview with Laura Ham, Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies. At SeMI Technologies, Laura works with their project Weaviate, an open-source knowledge graph program that allows users to do a contextualized search based on inputted data. However, unlike traditional databases, Weaviate attaches meanings and links within the data.

Laura details what knowledge graphs are and how they can be useful for both small and large projects. Explaining that ontology is the meaning of words, she tells us how Weaviate is able to use this concept to make more specific data entries and links, allowing users to perform better and more informative searches. Weaviate is able to do this with the help of Kubernetes. Later, Laura tells Gabi and Jon the ways Weaviate helps developers and users with thorough documentation, assistance with troubleshooting, and support from solution engineers.

Laura Ham

Laura is the Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies, where she takes care of building and supporting a community around their open source software product, Weaviate. She also takes care of the developer and user experience within the business, which means she writes documentation to support both developers and users, as well as researches and evaluates new software implementations on user experience. She has a user-centered approach in the work that she develops and designs. Laura is a full-time graduate student in Human Computer Interaction and Design with a special focus on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at EIT Digital Master School. Here, she learns about how to develop and design technology from a user perspective, and how to apply this with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Cool things of the week

• Use G Suite to make documents (and other tools) more accessible to people with disabilities blog
• 4 steps to stop data exfiltration with Google Cloud blog
• Using Colab to get more out of BigQuery blog
• Updates to AutoML Vision Edge, Auto ML Video, & AutoML Intelligence API blog

Interview

• SeMI Technologies site
• Weaviate site
• Weaviate GitHub github
• Weaviate documentation site
• GraphQL API github
• Kubernetes site
• GKE site
• Cloud BigTable site
• SeMI Technologies Meetups site

Question of the week

When will Python 2 reach the end of its life, and what does that mean for GCP?

• Python Google Cloud Client Libraries only support Python 3 github
• Countdown to end of life site

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

Jon will be at his twin’s wedding! Then Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match.

SeMI Technologies will be hosting meetups in NYC on October 24th, the Bay Area on October 25th, and Amsterdam on November 7th.

Sound Effect Attribution

• “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• “Small Group Laugh 2” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
• “02 Storm Orage” by ArnaudCoutancier of Freesound.org
• “Harry Potter Theme”, a clunky midi file rendition of music originally composed by John Williams. Purchase the soundtrack on Amazon