FOSDEM 2010 - part 3 #

Sunday started in Janson with Andrian Bowyer’s talk on RepRap machines, that is devices that can be used as manufacturing devices and are able to replicate themselves. After that I went over to the Mono dev room to listen to Miguel de Icaza on Mono Edge. A great talk on the history of Mono, the way the community interacts with Microsoft, the C# language itself and special features only available in Mono.

After this talk we went over to Janson for Andrew Tanenbaum’s talk on Minix. We knew quite a bit of the talk already from Froscon two years ago, however Andrew is an awesome speaker, so it’s always fun to catch up on the news on Minix.

The scalability talk started with an introduction to Hadoop by myself and continued with a talk on the facebook infrastructure by David Recordon. According to feedback I got after the talk, laughing with Thilo helped quite a bit to get myself calm. Before the talk I received one very good recommendation of one of the audio guys: Imagine you are giving the talk to one of your best friends - and forget about the microphone. Though I had way more slides than minutes to talk, we had enough time for the Q&A session after the talk. I started the talk by learning more about the audience - however this time not by handing the microphone to those listening (room too large) - I just asked them “have you heard about Hadoop?” - half of the audience. Are you Hadoop users: one quarter maybe. How large are your clusters? - 10 to 100 nodes mostly. Have you heard of Zookeeper? - some, Hive - some more, Pig - a few, Lucene - a lot, Solr - a little less, Mahout - maybe 5, Mahout users: 1.

Turns out the Mahout user in the audience was Olivier: It’s so nice to meet people you know are active on the mailing lists for real and have a chat with them. Hope to see you more often on the lists - and meet you face to face again.

I used the chance to announce the Berlin Buzzwords 2010, a two day event on search and scalability buzzwords like cloud computing, Hadoop, Lucene, NoSQL and more. It takes place on June 7th and 8th in the center of Berlin. Follow this blog for further information. Judging from the input I got after the announcement there is quite some need for such a conference in Europe.

The slides of my talk are soon to be available online.

After my talk I could stay in Janson: A talk on the Facebook infrastructure (not only the Hadoop side of things) followed. After that I met Lars George at the NoSQL dev room - unfortunately I did not manage to actually talk to Steven Noels, who organised the room.

The afternoon was reserved for Greg Kroah-Hartman on how to “Write and submit your first Linux Kernel Patch” - my personal conclusion: git is really awesome. I really, really need to find a few spare minutes to learn how to effectively use it.

In the evening we met with Pieter Hintjens for dinner - and to finalize an awesome weekend in Brussels and a great 10th anniversary FOSDEM. A huge Thank You to all volunteers and organisers of FOSDEM - you did a great job this year putting together an awesome schedule, you did a fantastic job making the now pretty huge event (with 306 talks and about 5000 hackers attending) run smoothly. Even the wireless was working from minute one. See you again at FOSDEM 2011.