Interesting project and fun to work on.

As with many of the other courses, could benefit from providing a few tests. Even after writing property-based tests using ScalaCheck there were some grader results that I was unable to reproduce.

In the end, still worth the time and effort invested.

The perfect end of the course. It manages to recap all the concept, the libraries and the exercises that has been done during all other courses. It is a good point to remember all the things that one has been made, and a good point to review all the things that were not so clear.

Buggy grader

Most of the case, it is hard to deal with big data. This course provides an opportunity to handle big data and visualize the handled result on UI. Also, as you learned from FPD in Scala course, UI is developed with Scala.js

For a lot of sections one couldn't really use Spark, said sections were restricted to translating Spark datastructures to Scala collections and working with those.

Milestones 1-3 was OK but milestone 4 require a much more efficient solution. And the only info grader gives you is the message about timeout. It would be better if requirements for milestones 1-3 were harder to fullfill or milestone 4 would not depend on previous code. But it depends and if your solution is inefficient it's very painful to search the problem all around the code. It's offered to use spark and other tools in this project but using spark is also painful. I get inconsistent result from grader with occasional OutOfMemory exceptions, but this project cries to be implemented with spark. I've learned something during this course but it was too stressfull and painful.

I enjoyed this course, but I believe there are some errors in the grading code related to interpolating colors. I raised an issue about it on the week 5 forum but never got a response. The project was interesting, but it would have been nice if there was a way that we could have been a bit more free in how we designed the interfaces. If you were trying to use something like a spark RDD it made it pretty cumbersome, having to always fit everything to an Iterable at the end. ALSO, I tried to add a library when I was doing this to add the shapeless library to this to add some interesting features which would have made the code a lot more general. I spent days getting it to work, only to realize you library dependencies are not actually imported when you submit, it only runs with the base ones that were pre-defined. A warning about that would have been nice.

Good Spark / Big Data project.

Provides a good example of real problem project focussed on Spark and big data analysis.

I really enjoyed this course - it goes from the very basics of Spark and tests your ability regarding Scala knowledge.

The capstone project is really well structured, but at times it felt like the instructors could give more information concerning some definitions around the project, i.e. how all of the case classes from the models file interconnect or relate to each other. By the end of the project it would be helpful explaining how the Layer class was actually structured as well.

In reality my opinion of this course is 4.5 out of 5 - I think the instructors made an admirable job trying to convey most of specialization concepts into the capstone, so congratulations :-). If not for some of the aspects above, I would rate it 5/5.

Awesome project!. It is not only wrapping all the previous concepts in a real use case, but also introducing a lot of different algorithms! Calculate deviations, spatial interpolation, great-circle distance, inverse distance weighting, etc.