PyBelfast
Takeaways

By Thomas Brown

Tom Brown
Kdb+ Developer
First Derivative

Here at First Derivative, we are always looking to the forefront of technology trends and what is going on in the market. Last week, our very own Thomas Brown attended a PyBelfast event, catching up on some new tech in this space and hearing from our colleagues at KX about the latest features of PyKx:

Recently I was delighted to attend an excellent, well-organised event hosted by Rapid7 a current client we are working with. The room was jam-packed in Rapid7’s Belfast office with interesting speakers presenting a wide range of fascinating products and topics. The standout session of the evening was from Conor McCarthy’s (KX – our sister company) as he demonstrated PyKX, harnessing the power of q and kdb+ from within Python.

After a few slices of pizza, I settled in to watch Conor demonstrate the intuitive nature of PyKX. With ease, he created a large, partitioned database of New York City taxi fares, containing millions of rows, all from within the comfort of a Python session. He effortlessly manipulated, sorted, and saved the data to disk. Conor then showcased PyKX’s impressive speed and efficiency in querying the database, comparing it against SQL and Pandas, with PyKX emerging as the clear winner in performance. Since its release, PyKX has gained considerable popularity, boasting over 150,000 downloads and earning numerous accolades. Last night’s reception only confirmed its growing reputation.

Conor displayed the intuitive nature of PyKX by creating a large, partitioned database of New York City taxi fares, containing millions of rows. He was able to quickly and easily load the data from files, manipulate it, sort it and save it down to disk, all from within the comfort of a Python session. Afterwards, he demonstrated the speed and ease at which the database can be queried, comparing against SQL and Pandas, with PyKX greatly outperforming both. Since its release, PyKX has proven to be quite popular, with over 150,000 downloads and many plaudits, judging by the reception last night, it has garnered many more.

Key Takeaway: PyKX is the gateway to kdb+ for Python developers and easily minimises the barrier between the two languages, opening up the door for more users to access the power of kdb+.

At First Derivative, we are uniquely positioned to support our clients with their data solutions with tools such as kdb+, Python, Java, cloud and DevOps engineering. We help our clients seamlessly integrate kdb+ with other systems, expand their data management and analysis capabilities, and easily connect to external databases, APIs, or third-party tools.

In addition to KX, there were 2 other interesting speakers detailing exciting new products in the market. Ronan Bradley from Ocula Technologies kicked the evening off with an introduction to Ocula Boost. Ocula Boost scans the product pages of customers’ websites and provides clear, prioritised recommendations across customer experience, technical performance and accessibility, to help give customers an advantage over their competitors.

Ocula Boost uses serverless functions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enabling the automatic scaling of services up or down, and pub/sub to enable tasks to be run in parallel to speed up processing time.

Key Takeaway: In an increasingly competitive market, firms are looking for more inventive ways to move ahead of competition. Ocula’s product has the potential to give firms that boost.

Finally, the audience had the pleasure of hearing from Artemiy (Art) Kondratiev, founder of Candor Security. Candor is a specialised security consultancy helping startups take security from ad-hoc to strategic.

He offered a captivating analogy, drawing from the TV show Father Ted, to illustrate what he termed the “Father Dougal anti-pattern.” This concept highlights the tendency for individuals to perceive a small issue right in front of them as equal in significance to a larger problem in the distance. However, the distant problem often holds greater importance. When a company falls into this anti-pattern, it signifies a lack of shared understanding among its teams.

But it wasn’t all laughs and jokes; Art delved into the sobering reality of data breaches, He mentioned that over 50% of data breaches are a result of stolen credentials and highlighted the real-world example of the RockYou data breach, where simple, common mistakes made a massive impact and could have been easily prevented.

Key Takeaway: A shared understanding between the security team and the rest of a firm is an essential component to an effective security setup, which has the potential to save a company a lot of money and prevent reputational damage.

This event was truly captivating, offering insights from individuals representing various companies and unveiling exciting new products. Among them, KX’s PyKX stood out as a personal favourite. As a sister company of KX and the foremost provider of KX Services globally, First Derivative is uniquely positioned to deliver groundbreaking products that shape industries. With over 25 years of consistent innovation, First Derivative has been the trusted partner for some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions.