Welcome to the Hex Field blog. We’ll be posting here periodically, and wanted to set out what you can expect to find.
What we’ll write about
Package news. Hex Field maintains skiLift and skiPatrol (formerly RSnowflake and snowflakeR) under an agreement with Posit. Posit’s announcement post explains why it took the packages on. Release notes and new features will appear on the Posit blog and in the Piste Guide to R and Snowflake. Here we’ll add practical write-ups: patterns we see in the field, worked examples, and the reasoning behind design decisions.
The polyglot notebook toolkit. The snowflake-notebook-polyglot toolkit adds Scala, Java, R, and Julia to Snowflake Workspace Notebooks. It began life at Snowflake Labs as snowflake-notebook-multilang; Hex Field now maintains it as an independent community project, not supported by Snowflake or Posit, and helps teams get started with it. Our first technical post, Beyond Python: Scala, Java, R, and Julia in Snowflake Workspace Notebooks, is a complete guide to it.
Our work. Hex Field provides independent consulting across big data and cloud data platforms, ML and AI data engineering, and open-source infrastructure. Where we can share it, we’ll write up what we’ve learned on engagements, with lessons that generalise beyond a single project.
Industry commentary. We’ll also post occasional thoughts on data platforms, feature stores, model serving, and the open-source ecosystem around them.
Get in touch
If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, or you’d like help with any of the above, email [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn.