Slack makes it easier to say you're out to lunch

Slack is making it easier for coworkers to see what other people in their organization are up to, thanks to a new status-message feature unveiled Thursday. The functionality, which is rolling out to the messaging service’s customers over the next few days, lets users set a message in their profile that informs others about their…

Databricks lays production data pipelines

Aiming to provide data engineers with new and better tools for creating production data pipelines, Databricks yesterday released Databricks for Data Engineering, a new version of its Apache Spark-based cloud platform optimized specifically for data engineering workloads. Databricks, founded by the creators of Apache Spark, already provides a version of the cloud platform geared toward…