hamilton VS Dask

In this post, we’ll show how your team can turn any utility function(s) into reusable IPython Jupyter magics for a better notebook experience. As an example, we’ll use Hamilton, my open source library, to motivate the creation of a magic that facilitates better development ergonomics for using it. You needn’t know what Hamilton is to understand this post.

We built an app with it -- https://blog.dagworks.io/p/building-a-lightweight-experiment. You can see the code here https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton/blob/main/hamilton/....

Usually we've been prototyping with streamlit, but found that at times to be clunky. FastUI still has rough edges, but we made it work for our lightweight app.

This library is old news? Is there anything new that they've added that's noteworthy to take it for another spin?

[disclaimer I'm a maintainer of Hamilton] Otherwise FYI Prophet gels well with https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton for setting up your features and dataset for fitting & prediction[/disclaimer].

I had been hearing these pains from Langchain users for quite a while. Suffice to say I think:

1. too many layers of OO abstractions are a liability in production contexts. I'm biased, but a more functional approach is a better way to model what's going on. It's easier to test, wrap a function with concerns, and therefore reason about.

2. as fast as the field is moving, the layers of abstractions actually hurt your ability to customize without really diving into the details of the framework, or requiring you to step outside it -- in which case, why use it?

Otherwise I definitely love the small amount of code you need to write to get an LLM application up with Langchain. However you read code more often than you write it, in which case this brevity is a trade-off. Would you prefer to reduce your time debugging a production outage? or building the application? There's no right answer, other than "it depends".

To that end - we've come up with a post showing how one might use Hamilton (https://github.com/dagWorks-Inc/hamilton) to easily create a workflow to ingest data into a vector database that I think has a great production story. https://open.substack.com/pub/dagworks/p/building-a-maintain...

Note: Hamilton can cover your MLOps as well as LLMOps needs; you'll invariably be connecting LLM applications with traditional data/ML pipelines because LLMs don't solve everything -- but that's a post for another day.

This is me. I drive an open source library Hamilton that people doing time-series/ML work love to use. I'm building a paid product around it at DAGWorks, and I'm after feedback on our current version. Can I entice anyone to:

From a nuts and bolts perspective, I've been thinking of building some reactivity on top of https://github.com/dagworks-inc/hamilton (author here) that could get at this. (If you have a use case that could be documented, I'd appreciate it.)

Most people don't track lineage because it's difficult (though if you use something like https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton to write your pipeline - author here - it can come almost for free).

Otherwise, I'm biased here, but check out https://github.com/dagworks-inc/hamilton - it could be your universal layer that expresses how things should flow, that is orchestration system agnostic, which would make it easy to migrate between systems easily.

Data scientists work on phenomenally large datasets, and Dask is a handy tool for exploration within the confines of a single cloud VM or their local PCs. Location data visualization is an essential part of deciding further algorithm development and roadmap for projects. This lays the foundation for data engineering and science to work at scale, with petabytes of data.

Dask

We're using a lot of Python. In addition to these, gridMET, Dask, HoloViz, and kerchunk.

I wrote this for speeding up the RPC messaging in dask, but figured it might be useful for others as well. The source is available on github here: https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec.

Dask: Distributed data frames, machine learning and more

To do that, we are efficiently using Dask, simply creating on-demand local (or remote) clusters on task run() method:

Look into Dask, see: https://dask.org/

[1] https://dask.org/