February 2024 Summaries

Last weekend, Hex and Modelbit hosted a San Francisco public data hackathon at their office downtown. The event brought together a hundred curious data people to explore public municipal datasets from the San Francisco Open Data portal. Participants were given free Hex and Modelbit accounts and set loose on the data. Twenty teams submitted finished projects that ranged from Vision Pro data apps to careful analysis of sidewalk width variance. The winning project analyzed traffic accidents in the city over the last 18 years, building a model that provides an aggregated risk level for every intersection along a route. The runner-up project combined movie film locations and SF Muni bus routes, creating an app that helps users locate famous film locations on their chosen bus route or find transit directions to their favorite San Francisco film location.

Hex has released a new workspace homepage that makes finding important and frequently accessed projects easy. The updated homepage adopts a "bento box" pattern, with dedicated sections for recently viewed projects, popular projects this week in the workspace, collections being updated, and recently published projects. It also highlights Collections more prominently and includes a card representation of projects with previews and relevant metadata. Favorites have a new home in the sidebar, making them easier to access from all parts of the homepage. The new homepage is responsive to various screen widths and has been extensively tested by Hex's internal team.

Jupyter Notebooks have been widely used by data scientists for years due to their ability to allow fast iteration and self-documenting logs. However, they are not designed for modern data workflows as they lack real version control, integrations with other tools, and the capability to operate on large datasets. Hex is a cloud-native notebook that addresses these issues by offering easy setup, direct integration with other tools, collaboration features, and support for large datasets. It also treats SQL as a first-class citizen, enabling users to write SQL in full-featured cells without needing to know Python. Additionally, Hex supports real-time multiplayer collaboration, versioning, and the ability to create polished data apps that can be shared with anyone.

This article provides practical tips for maximizing the use of Snowflake data warehouse. It highlights the benefits of using Snowpark, a feature that allows users to utilize compute resources beyond SQL queries. The author demonstrates how Snowpark can be used for building machine learning models and data engineering pipelines without transferring data between different tools and environments. Additionally, the article discusses cost control measures such as setting query timeouts and adjusting auto-suspend times for warehouses. It also emphasizes the importance of choosing an appropriate exploratory workbench like Hex to analyze Snowflake data effectively.