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Erik Gfesser

📍 Greater Chicago Area

New Book Review: "R in a Nutshell"

New book review for R in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Second Edition), by Joseph Adler, O'Reilly, 2012: This book is the second that I purchased this past year to get up to speed on the R language and environment, along with "R in Action"

New Book Review: "Drools Developer's Cookbook"

New book review for Drools Developer's Cookbook, by Lucas Amador, Packt Publishing, 2012: In my earlier review of "Instant Drools Starter", I mentioned that since it had been several years since I had last used a rules engine to any significant extent on a work project,

Pro Bono: IEEE Chicago Section Statistician - Part 3

This post is the third in a series on my pro bono efforts outside of the workplace as Statistician for the IEEE Chicago Section, a new position that I filled this past year after the membership development team realized that ongoing data analyses and reporting was needed around declining enrollment.

New Book Review: "Revenue and the CMO"

New book review for Revenue and the CMO: How Marketing Will Impact Revenue Through Big Data & Social Selling, by Glenn Gow, Crimson Marketing, 2013: Copy provided by publicist Crystal Ponti. This book is all about how the Chief Marketing Officer, and those with similar roles, can bridge the gap

No Fluff Just Stuff 2013 Day 3:Gittin' Git

Gittin' Git (Raju Gandhi) November 10, 2013: 2:15 PM – 3:45 PM From the conference materials: Git, at it's core, leverages a relatively simple data structure to maintain history. In this session we will take a look at this data-structure, which in turn will give us

No Fluff Just Stuff 2013 Day 3:Simulation Testing with Simulant

Simulation Testing with Simulant (Stuart Halloway) November 10, 2013: 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM From the conference materials: Simulation allows a rigorous, scalable, and reproducible approach to testing. The separation of concerns, and the use of a versioned, time-aware database, give simulation great power. This talk will introduce simulation

New Book Review: "No Better Time"

New book review for No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet, by Molly Knight Raskin, Da Capo Press, 2013: Copy provided by Amazon. The back cover description of this book as "a riveting personal and high-tech story, with a heartbreaking

Agile Wall Board Hacks: Heat Map

Early this year, I set up a traditional agile wall board for my last client project, and this post is a modified and expanded version of an internal post that I had written about this experience at my consulting firm employer, which I will likely modify once again for our

New Book Review: "Spring Batch in Action"

New book review for Spring Batch in Action, by Arnaud Cogoluegnes, Thierry Templier, Gary Gregory, and Oliver Bazoud, Manning Publications, 2011: Probably one of the best written and edited technical texts ever compiled in the Java space. Well recommended for anyone looking to understand how Spring Batch can be used

Rave Run: Great Western Trail (Lombard, Illinois)

This post is my fourth in a series that I started a couple years ago, unabashedly based on a regular spread in Runner's World Magazine called Rave Runs, in order to share interesting routes with other runners. Why a post on running within a blog that concentrates on