The technology behind "The Best Country for observing the Northern Lights”

No matter what kind of jobs (developers, managers, CEO, etc.) we do, all of us have a hobby, sometimes even more than one and it is great! So, I’m not an exception here. I do landscape photography and I found myself in love with the Northern Lights, astrophotography and many more sub-genres. Have you seen that Green Lady dancing over the sky? Oh boy, you better do this ASAP!

A friend of mine asked me about traveling north for the purpose of hunting the Northern Lights. This type of question is very complicated to answer, there are reasons for that. How would you compare landscapes (sceneries), experiences, culture, and people of that culture? They are all unique! It was really problematic to answer such an inquiry.

Having a background in data analysis (and a bit of science), I decided to solve this problem as a software engineer - define a problem, find consumable data sources and do some code for the sake of the result!

In this talk, I’ll be covering the following parts:

- how a funny experiment turned into a case study;

- how Java turned into the most powerful tool in the context of data analysis;

- why Java and not Python.

The idea and the key takeaway of this talk are to showcase how your job skills and your hobby can work side-by-side to producing beautiful results and how useful Java could be for parallel data pipelines.