Stowaway

Fabric OS

on 1 December 2014 at about 17:17

Fabric OS

So last week I left Fabric Worldwide where I've been working for the last year. It's been a fantastic experience, and I've worked with a really great bunch of people, some of the cleverest and most collegiate co-workers I've ever met.

Fabric OS is a data analytics platform - styled as "the Pinterest of data" - which crunches vast amounts of raw data from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Analytics, Quantcast, MediaMind, and the SnowPlow analytics tag, and presents that data in an easy-to-read way. I worked with some excellent devops and software engineers producing a REST API out of the data pipeline, and led a team of frontenders to build a Javascript application to consume and display that information in an intuitive interface. The pipeline was implemented using Java processing data from Redshift and Hadoop; the API was a Python / Flask application exposing a DynamoDB store using Cloudsearch; and the front-end was built using OOJS, JQuery, Leaflet and D3 to provide graphing and visualisation tools. The product was used by Unilever, the Times, NHS and others.

It was eye-opening in a number of ways - e.g. the sheer cost of running large scale applications on AWS, the pitfalls of outsourcing work to offshore outfits, and the multi-disciplinary teams that you need to put together to deliver a product end to end - but mostly it was great to be involved with a project at the cutting edge of data analytics being built by fantastic people.

Filed in: Web Portfolio