A nice feature of pyspark applications is that you don’t have to use spark-submit manually. Instead, when you instantiate a SparkContext instance, it will take care of running spark-submit ... pyspark-shell for you. Sometimes, however, you may want to customize that launch a bit. For instance, it is useful to tell spark-submit to include specific libraries in the classpath; which is in and of itself a pretty cool feature because you can provide Maven coordinates. ... Read more

Ethereum transactions require you to pay a fee that is measured with gas. Every instruction executed by the EVM costs a certain amount of gas, so before queuing your transaction, you have to specify a gas limit and a gas price. That gas is paid in ether, so for example, if your transaction has a gas limit of 82470 and your gas price is, say, 1 Gwei (0.000000001 ΞTH), then the cost of the transaction would be: ... Read more

Learning a new technology is always a daunting task, specially when in its early stages. Ethereum is one of such technologies and, soon enough, after starting your journey you get a lot of new terminology/projects thrown at you: Solidity, MetaMask, Mist, Serpent, Rinkeby, Ropsten, Kovan, Parity, Truffle, Geth, etc, etc. As you start wrapping your head around some of those new concepts it is common to focus on specific parts of the whole technology. ... Read more

It seems like no matter how much experience I gain as a developer, and as a human being, time to time I end up going deep into some rabbit hole. This time, in one of those deadly spirals of random clicking on the net I ended up learning about Ethereum. How did I get from there to creating Hugo-based blog hosted on the InterPlanetary File System? I thought I was done with blogging. ... Read more