Inductive Bias

Last November I innocently asked Grant what it would take to make him to give a talk in Berlin. The only requirement he told me was that I’d have to pay for his flight. About eight months later we had Berlin Buzzwords - a conference all around the topics scalability, data storage and search. With Simon Willnauer, Uwe Schindler, Michael Busch, Robert Muir, Grant Ingersoll, Andrzej Bialecki and many others we had quite a few Lucene people in town.

From the NoSQL community, Peter Neubauer, Rusty Klophaus, Jan Lehnardt, Mathias Meyer, Eric Evans and many others made sure people got their fair share of NoSQL knowledge. With Aaron Kimball, Jay Booth, Doug Judd and Steve Loughran we had several Hadoop and related people at the conference.

The conference also featured two talks on Apache Mahout: An overview from Frank Scholten as well as a more in-depth talk by Sean Owen. It’s great to see the project grow - not only in terms of development community but also in terms of requests from professional Mahout users.

In addition we had a keynote by Pieter Hintjens that concentrated on messaging in general and 0MQ in particular - a scalability topic otherwise highly underrepresented at Berlin Buzzwords.

We got well over 300 attendees that filled Berlin Kosmos - a former cinema. Attendees were a good mixture of Apache and non-Apache people, developers and users. People used the breaks and bar tours after the event to get in touch, exchange ideas. It’s always good to see developers discuss design issues and architectural challenges.

Monday evening was reserved for local people taking out the speakers and interested attendees for Bar Tours to Friedrichshain. Those from Berlin took Berlin Buzzwords people to their favourite restaurants and bars - or to what they considered to be “typical Berlin”. Some spent evenings later that week drinking beer or Berliner Weisse.

The tour for keynote speakers Grant Ingersoll, Pieter Hintjens and friends was organised by Julia and myself. We went over to Kreuzberg - some went to famous Burgermeister for Burgers, the other half went to a nearby Indian restaurant. After that we spent the evening in Club der Visionäre - a club next to the water. Me personally I left at about midnight - several people of the Lucene community moved to the well known Fette Ecke later on.

When asking the audience about repeating the conference next year, all hands went up immediately. Beside lots of praise for the organisation, from the feedback form we put up we got some good ideas on how to improve the conference next year. I’d love to have you guys back here in 2011 - and I’d love to get even more attendees in. Was great fun having you here. Thanks for 5 great days:

Five instead of two days, because:

• Keynote speakers got a special treatment - that is a personal city guide for the weekend before Buzzwords.
• We had the official conference start on Sunday with a Barcamp.
• We had another Apache dinner on Wednesday with those Apache people that live in Berlin. In addition the Aaron and Sarah joined us as they were still in town for the Apache Hadoop trainings. Also Greg Stein had pizza and beer with us - he was in town for the svn conference at the end of the week.

Thanks to all who helped turn this conference into a success: Julia Gemählich for conference management, Ulf and Wetter for WiFi setup, Nils for travel management, Simon and Jan for support ranking talks and reaching out to your communities, all speakers for fantastic talks, those taking pictures of the conference and sharing them on Flickr for showing those who stayed at home how great the conference was, peoplezapping for the videos that will soon be available online, all sponsors for supporting the conference, all attendees for their participation. I’d love to have all of you (and many more) back in Berlin next year. An informal call for presentations has been set up already - submit now and be the one to set the trend instead of just following the Buzzwords!

For those who do not want to wait for another year: We will have another Apache Hadoop Get Together in September 2010 - watch this space for more information. If you’d like to give a talk their and present your Hadoop/ Solr/ Lucene etc. system - please get in touch with me.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, Events Apache, berlinbuzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, Mahout, NOSQL

Staying in town after Berlin Buzzwords? Interested in meeting with the Apache folks here? Torsten Curdt kindly organises an Apache Dinner on Wednesday evening after Berlin Buzzwords. If you would like to participate, contact Torsten for details on when and where it will take place.

Though named Apache dinner, there is no need to be Apache committer or even member to participate: Being generally interested in Apache projects and in meeting the guys behind the project is totally sufficient.

Apache Dinner Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords Apache Dinner, Berlin, berlinbuzzwords

A few hours ago, Jan Lehnardt posted a link on How to organise a nerd conference - joking that this is how we planned Berlin Buzzwords. Well, it is not exactly that easy - however the comic actually is not so far from the truth either:

About two years ago, after having started Apache Mahout together with Grant Ingersoll, Karl Wettin and others, several Apache Hadoop user groups, meetups and get togethers started to pop up all around the world. The one closest to me was the Hadoop user group UK. Back in 2008 I was pretty envious to all these user groups - being so distributed, there was no way I could ever attend all of them, though talks were certainly interesting. So the naive thought of a back then naive free software developer was: Let’s have that in Berlin. To have initial talks I called Stefan Groschupf. His answer was very positive: Oh yeah, let’s do this. I am in Germany for another two weeks, so it should be at about that timeframe. We agreed that if no-one showed up, we could still have some pizza together and share insights from our projects.

For the venue I knew from regular meetups of the Free Software Foundation Europe - read FSF*E* - that newthinking store was available for free for meetups for devs of free software. On I went, calling Martin from the store, booked the room. After that some mails went to the usual suspects, mailing lists and such. At the first meetup two years ago, more than 15 attendees - with two more people who had prepared slides. Pizzas obviously had to wait a little.

If you are wondering what that looked like back then - Thanks to Martin for taking the image back then and putting it online.

We (as in all attendees) decided to repeat the exercise three months later*, talks for the next time were proposed during that first session. Noone objected to having it in Berlin again - everyone knew this was the only way to avoid having to do the organization next time.

The meetup grew steadily in size, talks started being proposed three to six months in advance. I ended up creating not only a mailing list for the meetup but also a blog so I could publish news on Jan’s CouchDB talk and Lars George’s HBase talk back then. We got video sponsoring from Cloudera (Thanks Christophe), StudiVZ (Thanks Nils), and Nokia (Thanks Matt). Late last year I did the first European NoSQL meetup together with Jan Lehnardt - 80 attendees, lots of potential for more, the newthinking store obviously a bit too small for that

If you are wondering what NoSQL and Hadoop meetups looked like last time:

During that meetup the idea was born for a larger NoSQL conference in Berlin in 2010. First ideas were tossed around together with Jan and Simon Willnauer during Apache Con US in Oakland. The topic Hadoop got added there. In January 2010 finally Lucene was added to the mix. We contacted newthinking for support - got a very warm welcome.

Now - two years after the first Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin we are proud to host Berlin Buzzwords - focussed on NoSQL, Apache Hadoop and search as in Apache Lucene.The conference is co-organised by newthinking communications, Simon Willnauer, Jan Lehnardt and myself. A big thanks to neofonie for supporting me by making it possible that I could do most of the organisation during my regular working hours.

The speaker lineup looks fantastic. Registration is going very well - exceeding expectations (did I mention that registration is still open, group and student tickets still available?).

I am really looking forward to an amazing conference on 7th and 8th of June. We will have a NoSQL barcamp in newthinking store Sunday evening before the conference. Keynote speaker packages have been sent out and were well received. Hotel rooms for speakers are booked. We are about to pull together the last loose ends in the coming days. Happy to have so many guys (and a few girls) interested in scalability topics here in town at the beginning of June. Looking forward to seeing you in Berlin.

* The second meetup turned out to be the first and so far only one that took place w/o the organiser - I broke my leg on my way to newthinking by getting hit by a BMW X5… *sigh* Note for other meetup organizers: Always have a backup moderator - in may case that was my neofonie manager Holger Düwiger who happened to attend that meetup for the first time back then.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, Mahout Events, Hadoop, Lucene, Meetups, NOSQL, Solr

Meet me in two weeks at Berlin Buzzwords. As you may have noticed, together with Simon Willnauer, Jan Lehnardt and newthinking communications I am organising Berlin Buzzwords - a conference on scalable search, data analysis and storage.

There are a few regular tickets left, so don’t wait too long to register. If you want to bring your friends, check out our group tickets with up to 50% discount. If you are a student bring your student ID and register for 100,- Euro.

Berlin Buzzwords Apache, Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL

Like most software developers I like tasks that involve solving more or less complex problems analytically. Most developers I know love puzzles - either those that involve dis-entangling metal rings, or those involving putting wooden pieces back into order, or even solving Rubik’s cube:

Working on the schedule for Berlin Buzzwords, I noticed that coming up with a good schedule actually has a lot more in common with solving puzzles that one is usually aware of: First of all talks on similar or related topics should not take place at the same time. Presentations should be grouped according to common topics so attendees don’t have to switch room after each and every talk. In addition some speakers have a tight schedule themselves and can only be at the conference for a day.

It gets even more interesting if after having put up a draft of the initial schedule you start filling the gaps, publishing those talks that were confirmed later than others or could be accepted only after freeing a spot somewhere else.

I spent the past few day re-arranging the Berlin Buzzwords schedule a bit. I added Christophe’s talk on Apache Hadoop from an industry perspective. After adding it, I had 45min left in the NoSQL track - on the other hand there was a speaker from the Lucene community that we very much liked to have in. So off I went, sorting and shifting around until finally the Lucene talk ended up in the Lucene track and a Hadoop talk that was formerly there ended up in the Apache Hadoop track, resulting in one NoSQL talk from the Apache Hadoop track moving over to the NoSQL track…

To cut a long story short: The schedule is final now - unless changes need to be made last minute.

Berlin Buzzwords, Freetime buzzwords, puzzles, schedule

The Berlin Buzzwords schedule was published a few days ago. There are tracks specific to the three tags search, store and scale. We have a fantastic mixture of developers and users of open source software projects that make scaling data processing today possible.

There is Steve Loughran, Aaron Kimball and Stefan Groschupf from the Apache Hadoop community. We have Grant Ingersoll, Robert Muir and the “Generics Policeman” Uwe Schindler from the Lucene community.

For those interested in NoSQL databases there is Mathias Stearn from MongoDB, Jan Lehnardt from CouchDB and Eric Evans, the guy who coined the term NoSQL one year ago.

The schedule has been published online. Visit the webpage and register for the conference - looking forward to seeing you in Berlin this summer!

Regular tickets are available online. In addition we offer student tickets: If you have a valid student ID, you are eligible for one of these tickets. Each costs 100,- Euro. We also have a special group ticket available: If you buy four tickets or more you are eligible for a discount of 25%, when purchasing 10 tickets or more the discount is 50%. Learn more at http://berlinbuzzwords.de/content/tickets

One day before the conference we are having a Berlin Buzzwords Barcamp in town. In addition, directly after the conference, Cloudera will be hosting Apache Hadoop trainings - registration is separate from Berlin Buzzwords.

So just in case you need a good excuse for a long term trip to Berlin: You can spend the weekend in town, attend the Barcamp on Sunday evening, visit Berlin Buzzwords on Monday and Tuesday. The rest of the week could be used to take part in Apache Hadoop trainings. Finally you have one weekend left for a city tour.

Thanks to Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer and newthinking communications for co-organising the event.

Berlin Buzzwords buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL

One week to go for submitting a talk on your favourite NoSQL topic, your favourite search application or your most interesting data analysis task: The call for presentations for Berlin Buzzwords ends on April 17th, that is Sunday next week.

Shortly after the last talk was submitted we will start announcing speakers - final list of speakers is to be expected by the start of May, final schedule will be published shortly after that.

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, Mahout, NOSQL, registration

I would like to invite everyone interested in data storage, analysis and search to join us for two days on June 7/8th in Berlin for Berlin Buzzwords - an in-depth, technical, developer-focused conference located in the heart of Europe. Presentations will range from beginner friendly introductions on the hot data analysis topics up to in-depth technical presentations of scalable architectures.

Our intention is to bring together users and developers of data storage, analysis and search projects. Meet members of the development team working on projects you use. Get in touch with other developers you may know only from mailing list discussions. Exchange ideas with those using your software and get their feedback while having a drink in one of Berlin’s many bars.

Early bird registration has been extended until April 17th - so don’t wait too long.

If you would like to submit a talk yourself: Conference submission is open for little more than one week. More details are available online in the call for presentations:

Looking forward to meeting you in the beautiful, vibrant city of Berlin this summer for a conference packed with high profile speakers, awesome talks and lots of interesting discussions.

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords, Cassandra, Hadoop, hbase, Lucene, Mahout, NOSQL, Solr

Call for Presentations Berlin Buzzwords
http://berlinbuzzwords.de
Berlin Buzzwords 2010 - Search, Store, Scale
7/8 June 2010

This is to announce the opening of the Berlin Buzzwords 2010 call for presentations. Berlin Buzzwords is the first conference on scalable and open search, data processing and data storage in Germany, taking place in Berlin.

The event will comprise presentations on scalable data processing. We invite you to submit talks on the topics:

• Information retrieval, search - Lucene, Solr, katta or comparable solutions
• NoSQL - like CouchDB, MongoDB, Jackrabbit, HBase and others
• Hadoop - Hadoop itself, MapReduce, Cascading or Pig and relatives

Closely related topics not explicitly listed above are welcome. We are looking for presentations on the implementation of the systems themselves, real world applications and case studies.

Important Dates (all dates in GMT +2)

• Submission deadline: April 17th 2010, 23:59
• Notification of accepted speakers: May 1st, 2010.
• Publication of final schedule: May 9th, 2010.
• Conference: June 7/8. 2010.

High quality, technical submissions are called for, ranging from principles to practice. We are looking for real world use cases, background on the architecture of specific projects and a deep dive into architectures built on top of e.g. Hadoop clusters.

Proposals should be submitted at http://berlinbuzzwords.de/content/cfp no later than April 17th, 2010. Acceptance notifications will be sent out on May 1st. Please include your name, bio and email, the title of the talk, a brief abstract in English language. Please indicate whether you want to give a short (30min) or long (45min) presentation and indicate the level of experience with the topic your audience should have (e.g. whether your talk will be suitable for newbies or is targeted for experienced users.)

The presentation format is short: either 30 or 45 minutes including questions. We will be enforcing the schedule rigorously.

If you are interested in sponsoring the event (e.g. we would be happy to provide videos after the event, free drinks for attendees as well as an after-show party), please contact us.

Follow @hadoopberlin on Twitter for updates. News on the conference will be published on our website at http://berlinbuzzwords.de

Program Chairs: Isabel Drost, Jan Lehnardt, and Simon Willnauer.

Schedule and further updates on the event will be published on http://berlinbuzzwords.de

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL, Solr

Silently registration was opened in the past days for Berlin Buzzwords - a conference on scaling search, data processing and storage taking place on June 7th/8th in Berlin/ Germany. First 100 tickets will be sold for 250 Euros + tax. Registration is possible at later dates as well, however expect prizes to rise shortly before the conference starts.

If you clicked on it earlier this week and were wondering what those strange German terms were all about: We have put online an English version as well, so language shouldn’t be much of a problem anymore.

To avoid any confusion: Conference talks will be in English - no German language skills needed for that. It is perfectly well possible to get around in Berlin w/o speaking German, however knowing a few words as always will make it easier to make friends with people in shops and hotels

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL