As you’ve probably gathered, we love connecting with the SAS community, especially our Metacoda customers!
If you haven’t already, please take a few moments to fill in our survey about your plans with SAS® Viya® and how Metacoda can help meet your needs.
So far, common survey themes include securing the SAS platform, and the value that Metacoda provides. So if you haven’t yet experienced Metacoda software, consider giving yourself the gift of a free trial after the holiday season.
Greetings to all and happy new year from the Metacoda team! We look forward to helping to make sure that 2020 brings you the confidence of a secure SAS platform.
In any community things tend to run most smoothly when each of us finds a role that best suits our strengths and preferences.
For me – as someone who loves socializing and connecting – my role in the SAS community has evolved into what some have referred to as a ‘cheerleader’.
Fortunately this is a role I relish, and I’m so grateful to those who recognize and support me for doing what comes naturally!
I’m also grateful to SAS users around the world who are doing their bit to nurture our wonderfully connected SAS community. The gratitude and support that we give each other is part of the glue that keeps this community so robust.
Another important part of the glue is the many events that help us to meet, share and grow. We’re big fans of SAS events and SAS User Groups and encourage everyone to join in however you can. (Find a group here)
When it comes to the in-person events – which are still so important in this digital age – the recent SAS US Regional Conferences were a highlight on the US SAS calendar.
While I wasn’t able to attend, I was so glad to be able to support the events as a SAS community advocate and sponsor, and to be represented by our furry friends, the Metacoda Koalas. (Meeting people IRL – in real life – is certainly where human connections happen, but tweets like this are the next best thing for feeling connected!) Read more
When more than 6,000 SAS users came together at SAS Global Forum 2019 in Dallas, it was clear that we are living in exciting times, full of potential!
Dr Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO, set the scene perfectly in the opening session: “We are witnessing a renewed focus on data and analytics, driven by the combination of increased computing power, a more connected world and more powerful technologies, like artificial intelligence, computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning.”
To support his words, he blew us away with a live facial recognition demonstration, using an enthusiastic group of volunteers (including Metacoda’s Michelle Homes) and a model TinyYOLO v2. The model essentially converts each face into a vector of 512 floating point numbers, looks it up using nearest neighbour, and then returns a name. But obviously behind the scenes there’s a lot more going on: the facial recognition uses approximately 11 million parameters… with more than 22 million floating point operations that have to occur on a workstation with 2 GPUs… which sends the data to SAS Viya running ESP on 4 GPUs… which sends the pixels in the bounding box into a model that has 55 million parameters from FaceNet! If you’re intrigued, please see Dr Goodnight’s opening session presentation for yourself (and notice that even funny faces can’t fool that clever underlying algorithm!) 😉
As the year comes to an end, we wanted to say a special great big koala thanks to our less-furry friends for all your support!
We also wanted to show you the following video we made about our adventures in recent years. We’re a bit unusual in our love of adventure given that our real-live koala cousins in Australia don’t like to venture far from their favourite eucalypt tree (since it’s the only food they eat!).
We hope the clip brings back some happy memories and puts a smile on your face. Read more
It’s us – the Metacoda koalas back again full of effervescence, enthusiasm, and excitement for the year ahead – 2018!
We hope your festive season was as relaxing and fun as ours. For us, it was the perfect opportunity to catch up on sleep (we koalas need 20 hours sleep per day, you know?!) and to reflect on the amazing year just past.
2017 was definitely overflowing with magical moments, and we have managed to narrow it down to a short list of highlights to share with you below.
Of course, the next step is to create even more marvellous Metacoda koala memories with you in the year ahead… Read more
As 2017 ends and the festive season approaches we want to wish peace, joy and love to you and your families. We hope your 2017 reflection is one of success and happiness.
In thinking about the year – and the 10 years Metacoda has been operating – Paul and I feel very humbled to reflect on the benefits our customers have shared with us, and our contribution to the SAS community. In gives us great joy to contemplate where we were 11 years ago – brainstorming the plug-ins and tools – to where we are today. We’d like to thank our team, customers, partners, and friends for your support and alliance, and we look forward to continuing the Metacoda journey together in 2018.
As Colonel Chris Hadfield said at SAS Global Forum in April, “Love every step along the way. Life is not about your grand mission statements, it’s about what you do next”…
Metacoda celebrated its 10th birthday this month! It’s an exciting milestone and we’d like to extend a great big thanks to you for being part of our Metacoda community along the way.
We started off the year talking about journeys and, in particular, how we can help with your SAS security journey. We were wondering how it’s going?
In a recent blog post we highlighted how SAS Communities are aWEsome. We’d love to hear your experiences – please post a comment in the blog or chat to us in person at an upcoming SAS event.
Hope to see you in person or online soon!
Webinar: SAS® Security Design and Best Practices
Did you catch the SUGA: SAS security design and best practices webinar on Tuesday 12th September?
If not, you can go to SUGA to get the webinar recording, Q&A and slides. Angie Hedberg (SAS Technical Consulting Manager) and Michelle Homes (Metacoda) covered key design best practices for securing SAS 9.4 metadata and the file system, and how Metacoda can help to secure your SAS environment.
Save The Koala Month
It’s Save the Koala Month (#STKM) and the theme is “Love is in the Air”. So as supporters of the Australian Koala Foundation, we want to do our bit to spread the Koala love far and wide! Join in the #STKM2017 celebration and find out how you can help save the koala. Read more
It’s the Metacoda koalas again wanting to say a little “hooroo” to farewell 2016 and thank you for your support.
What a busy year we’ve had meeting incredible SAS users all over the world! Perhaps you saw us at a conference or event? Or even adopted one of our many furry siblings along the way?
When we sent out our latest Metacoda blog post, we were thrilled to read the reflective responses from friends about our Metacoda koala social images this year.
This got us thinking about the many Metacoda koala photos that have been tweeted or sent to us during the year, and we simply couldn’t resist sharing a few of them with you (see below). You’ll find Read more
You’ve probably seen us at a Metacoda stand, on social media, or mentioned at the end of a blog post… But we thought it was time to do our very own blog post so we can get to know each other a little better.
We’d like to start by telling you a bit about our two favourite things (besides eating gum leaves and sleeping, of course!).
Helping koalas
Our first favourite thing is helping our real koala friends.
In particular, we like to support the work of the Australian Koala Foundation (AKF), who are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year. They work really hard to protect koalas and their habitat, and they are even lobbying to introduce a Koala Protection Act similar to the Bald Eagle Act (enacted in the US in 1942).
So what better time to get involved with AKF – you can visit their website to:
purchase merchandise
make a donation
plant a tree
adopt a koala (you can’t take it home with you, but you can take one of us home if you want!)
Alternatively, you can chat to our Metacoda humans, Michelle or Paul, about how to get involved. They are really big koala fans (just as we’re really big Metacoda fans)!
Which leads us to our other favourite thing…
Meeting SAS users and spreading the message about Metacoda
Our other ‘favourite thing’ is travelling the world meeting SAS users and spreading the message about Metacoda.
We’ll be setting off later this month with Metacoda, to sponsor and present at a few SAS events in the UK and Europe in September and October. We’ll be sharing Read more
The SAS® Partner Forum is nearly here! We’re heading off to SAS headquarters in Cary, NC for this event on the 23rd & 24th September. The forum is a great opportunity for SAS partners to learn about new strategies and offerings, and to participate in discussions with SAS and others in the partner community. We’re excited about using this knowledge to continue helping SAS customers and the user community.
While we are in Cary, we’d also like to take the opportunity to catch up with and thank our friends and supporters at a Metacoda Meetup after 5pm on Tuesday 22nd September at Rally Point Grill Sport Bar. Being from the other side of the world, we’re excited about catching up in person with online community friends and those we see once a year at SAS Global Forum. We hope you can make it for a casual snack and drink. Please let us know if you’ll be there.
Save The Koala Month
If you’re a regular reader of our blog or tweets, you’ll probably already know we care about koalas. The Metacoda koalas travel the world with us and you can follow their adventures on YouTube. We’re also proud supporters of the Australian Koala Foundation (AKF), a charitable organization dedicated to protecting the koala and its natural habitat. With September being Save The Koala Month (#STKM2015) we’ll also have a donation box at the Metacoda MeetUp if you’d like to make a small donation. If you make a donation, you’ll go into a draw to adopt a koala for a year. You can also donate online at the AKF website – just let us know so we can include you in the draw.
We’ll randomly pick the adoptive parent at the end of Save The Koala Month, and the AKF will send you an adoption kit. Imagine adopting a cuddly koala!
See you soon!
We hope to see you soon. Be sure to let us know if you can make the Metacoda MeetUp (#MetacodaMeetUp).
