As non-gender-conforming and transgender folks become more visible and normalized, the standard male / female / other gender selections we all encounter in forms and surveys become more tired and outdated. First of all, the terms “male” and “female” generally refer to sex, or someones biological configuration, “including chromosomes, gene expression, hormone levels and function, and reproductive/sexual anatomy.” Male and female are not considered the correct terms for gender orientation, which “refers to socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people.” Although sex exists on a spectrum which includes intersex people, gender has a wide range of identities, including agender, bigender, and genderqueer. …
For the past year and a half, we at Brandfolder have been moving toward using BigQuery as a datalake. It began by storing a copy of all our raw data there, and we’ve steadily moved into storing feature extraction tables as well as data produced by machine learning models and accessed directly by our product. Housing data in BigQuery we find it much easier to access both in terms of speed and flexibility.
For those unfamiliar with Google BigQuery, it is a serverless cloud data warehouse (think database) with built-in and automated distributed computing. Initially, we started using BigQuery as a copy of our production database, and found ourselves leaning on it as our data size grew. …
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