Varick Media - Data Engineering to 3D Visualizations

My work at Varick Media ranged from data engineering to complex 3d visualizations in the browser - easily the most varied role I’ve ever had.

I started off writing mapreduce queries on Spark in Scala for data processing and analysis on their Hadoop cluster.

Then I made some complex 3d data visualizations in the browser utilizing Three.js and WebGL. This was a lot of fun. Also made a lot of 2d visualizations with D3.js.

After that I noticed that the front end could be heavily simplified with a front-end framework. So I researched them (the big 3 at the time were Angular 1, React, and Ember.js), and we ended up adopting Angular, which turned out to be a great decision (though I’ve since switched to React).

This is easily the most varied engineering role I’ve ever had. I don’t know of any jobs where an engineer is working on distributed data processing one month, and then 3d data visualizations the next. I had no experience with any of this stuff prior to being assigned to work on them, so I had to learn how to teach myself. Some of the stuff I was working on was so cutting edge that there were very few online resources.

I’m grateful for this role as it exposed me to types of work I never would’ve encountered otherwise.