The collection and analysis of user data by software companies is key part of the product development process. User data is valuable to more than just the company collecting it; it's valuable to the users themselves, too.

This year's annual AWS re:Invent conference was full of exciting product announcements. From long-awaited crowd-pleasers such as Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) to more unexpected delights such as Serverless Aurora, AWS customers have a lot to look forward to in the upcoming year. You can find an exhaustive list of announcements here.

A few months ago, Stack Overflow confirmed what many people have been predicting for years, and crowned Python king of the software jungle. According to the results of their 2017 survey, Python is currently both the fastest-growing language and the most visited Stack Overflow tag.

Amazon Redshift users got a nice surprise last month when AWS announced their new Dense Compute (DC2) nodes, providing up to twice the performance of their DC1 nodes, and at the same price. Now, leading up to next week's re:Invent 2017, AWS has announced some upcoming improvements, features, and fixes that will be rolling out over the coming weeks for their Redshift and Redshift Spectrum services that are sure to be crowd-pleasers:

Mode is the only analytics platform with native support for Python Notebooks. For the last year and a half, Mode users have been rapidly adopting our Notebooks, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down.

Analysts turn to Mode as the toolkit of choice for their work: SQL and Python-powered data exploration, visualization, and advanced analytics, delivered to teammates via accessible and interactive dashboards.