I recently started playing with OpenCV, an open-source Computer Vision library for image processing. Luckily there are Python bindings available. More luck that the guys like Adrian has done a great service by releasing both book and blog on a similar topic. I have also made a demo which can see below. Conclusion So this was a basic image processing tutorial in OpenCV. It is not a mature product as it can’t tell you about unique colors in a picture. It is just telling you informaiton based on pixel colors rather than performing color segmentation and clustering based on a ML algorithm. So what is it all about? Well, it…
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Create your first web scraper with Scraper API and Python
Recently I come across a tool that takes care of many of the issues you usually face while scraping websites. The tool is called Scraper API which provides an easy to use REST API to scrape a different kind of websites(Simple, JS enabled, Captcha, etc) with quite an ease. Before I proceed further, allow me to introduce Scraper API. What is Scraper API If you visit their website you’d find their mission statement: Scraper API handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the HTML from any web page with a simple API call! As it suggests, it is offering you all the things to deal with the issues…
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Create your first ETL Pipeline in Apache Spark and Python
In this post, I am going to discuss Apache Spark and how you can create simple but robust ETL pipelines in it. You will learn how Spark provides APIs to transform different data format into Data frames and SQL for analysis purpose and how one data source could be transformed into another without any hassle. What is Apache Spark? According to Wikipedia: Apache Spark is an open-source distributed general-purpose cluster-computing framework. Spark provides an interface for programming entire clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. From Official Website: Apache Spark™ is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. In short, Apache Spark is a framework which is…
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Getting started with Apache Cassandra and Python
In this post, I am going to talk about Apache Cassandra, its purpose, usage, configuration, and setting up a cluster and in the end, how can you access it in your Python applications. At the end of the post, you should have an idea of it and could start playing it for your next project. What is Apache Cassandra? According to Wikipedia: Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, wide column store, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandra offers robust support for clusters spanning multiple datacenters,[1] with asynchronous masterless replication…
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Getting started with Apache Airflow
This post is the part of Data Engineering Series. In this post, I am going to discuss Apache Airflow, a workflow management system developed by Airbnb. Earlier I had discussed writing basic ETL pipelines in Bonobo. Bonobo is cool for write ETL pipelines but the world is not all about writing ETL pipelines to automate things. There are other use cases in which you have to perform tasks in a certain order once or periodically. For instance: Monitoring Cron jobs transferring data from one place to other. Automating your DevOps operations. Periodically fetching data from websites and update the database for your awesome price comparison system. Data processing for recommendation based…
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Getting started with Apache Kafka in Python
This post is the part of Data Engineering Series. In this post, I am going to discuss Apache Kafka and how Python programmers can use it for building distributed systems. What is Apache Kafka? Apache Kafka is an open-source streaming platform that was initially built by LinkedIn. It was later handed over to Apache foundation and open sourced it in 2011. According to Wikipedia: Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation, written in Scala and Java. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Its storage layer is essentially a “massively scalable pub/sub message queue architected…
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Getting started with Elasticsearch in Python
The updated version of this post for Elasticsearch 7.x is available here. In this post, I am going to discuss Elasticsearch and how you can integrate it with different Python apps. What is ElasticSearch? ElasticSearch (ES) is a distributed and highly available open-source search engine that is built on top of Apache Lucene. It’s an open-source which is built in Java thus available for many platforms. You store unstructured data in JSON format which also makes it a NoSQL database. So, unlike other NoSQL databases ES also provides search engine capabilities and other related features. ElasticSearch Use Cases You can use ES for multiple purposes, a couple of them given below: You…
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How to create a custom token on Stellar network in Python
A few months back I made a post about Stellar that how you can use it in your Python applications. In this post, I am going to discuss that how you can create your own custom token, a.k.a, a coin programmatically in Python. Before I get into the code, I’d like to discuss what are tokens and their background, how they are different from Alt-coins and some Stellar network concepts. This post is lengthy so read it when you have ample time to read. What are Tokens? The term token is not new and many of us would have experienced the application of it one way or other. Tokens are…
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5 strategies to write unblockable web scrapers in Python
Introduction People who read my posts in scraping series often contacted me to know how could they write scrapers that don’t get blocked. It is very difficult to write a scraper that NEVER gets blocked but yes, you can increase the life of your web scraper by implementing a few strategies. Today I am going to discuss them. User-Agent The very first thing you need to take care of is setting the user-agent. User Agent is a tool that works on behalf of the user and tells the server about which web browser the user is using for visiting the website. Many websites do not let you view the content…
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Develop your first ETL job in Python using bonobo
In this post I am going to discuss how you can write ETL jobs in Python by using Bonobo library. Before I get into the library itself, allow me to discuss about ETL itself and why is it needed? What is ETL? ETL is actually short form of Extract, Transform and Load, a process in which data is acquired, changed/processes and then finally get loaded into data warehouse/database(s). You can extract data from data sources like Files, Website or some Database, transform the acquired data and then load the final version into database for business usage. You may ask, Why ETL?, well, what ETL does, many of you might already been doing…
