shafiab/HashtagCashtag

HashtagCashtag is a classic example of an Insight Data Engineering Fellowship project from the mid-2010s. While it boasts over 500 stars, these are historical artifacts from an era when this specific tech stack (Kafka, Spark, Cassandra) was the 'Big Data' gold standard for portfolio projects. From a competitive and technical standpoint, the project has no defensibility; it is a reference implementation of a well-known architectural pattern (Lambda Architecture). The velocity is zero, and the age (over 10 years) means the dependencies and specific API implementations are likely deprecated. Modern data platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, or managed cloud services (AWS Glue/Kinesis) have effectively commoditized this entire pipeline. Furthermore, LLMs have replaced the need for the manual sentiment analysis logic typically used in these older Spark-based projects. It serves well as a pedagogical reference for building distributed systems but holds no commercial or strategic moat.