Inductive Bias

the evening after FrOSCon - that is on August 22nd 2010 at 7:30p.m. CEST - a combined “FSFE Fellowship meetup/ Apache dinner*” takes place in Tigges in Düsseldorf (Brunnenstraße 1, at Bilker S-Bahnhof). Given it doesn’t rain, we’ll be sitting outside.

Would be great to meet you there for tasty food, interesting discussions on Apache in general, as well as projects like Lucene, Hadoop or Tomcat in particular. Anyone interested in either the FSFE or Apache is welcome to join us.

One personal request: Somehow, Rainer (Kersten, FSFE) talked me into preparing a talk on what the ASF is all about - would be really great to have more people around share their experience.

See you in Düsseldorf

Apache, Events, Free Software, Freetime Apache, Dinner, DUS, FSFE

This evening yet another Apache Dinner took place in Berlin (this time Schöneberg), location booked by Simon Willnauer. As it was announced less then a week ago (see post below) we were expecting no more then some 7 people … we ended up being a group of 15 attendees: There was Michi Busch from Twitter together with Tanja, Uwe Schindler from Bremen joined us. With Matt and Josh some of our local Hadoop users from Nokia joined our group. We had Sebastian Schelter from Mahout. In addition there were the usual suspects, that is Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer and Torsten Curdt.

Indian food at Yogi Haus was great and very tasty - though we should introduce a sharing algorithm for the various dishes next time around. Speaking of next time: If you would like to be part of the dinner, subscribe to our Apache Dinner mailing list. Best way to make the location suit your needs is to simply send out the next proposal yourself.

As usual the Lucene guys are the last to leave: Currently they are on their way to X-Berg for further drinks, some food and lots of fun. Looking forward to the pictures you promised, Simon

Update: Images added. Thanks for forwarding them.

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache, Berlin, Dinner

Simon (Willnauer) just sent around the following e-mail. If you have some time left next Monday evening, come join us in Yogihaus: For tasty Indian food, geeky discussions and a generally beautiful evening.

Unlike the other dinner mails this one is not a poll, it’s an announcement. Some Apache folks are in town next monday (9th of August) so we decided to have a Apache Dinner with a short term notice. If you plan to come please shoot me a quick heads-up and I count you in!

We will meet at http://www.restaurant-yogihaus-berlin.de/ on Monday 9th of August at 7:30 pm. I will reserve a table for about 14 people (the average size of the last two meetings while gstein and his gang wasn’t counted :D)

Looking forward to meet you there on Monday!!

Simon

Looking forward to seeing you on Monday evening next week. Please do not forget to give Simon a quick heads-up if you are coming: Would be nice if our estimated number of guests would at least be close to the real number this time (instead of somewhere at 50% ).

In the unlikely event that you can’t make it next Monday, please subscribe to our Apache Dinner Mailinglist to recieve further announcements. If you are not living in Berlin but are still interested in dropping in from time to time: Don’t worry we do take into account that schedules of people travelling here are tight and organise meetings accordingly.

Update: Corrected year - must have mixed that up with another conference’s kick off meeting that takes place today…

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache, Dinner

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

After Berlin Buzzwords was over yesterday - and as there is an svn conference in the city that starts tomorrow, we thought we could easily put together a smallish Apache Dinner for tonight. So Torsten mailed a few people, booked some space at Heinz Minki in Kreuzberg. We announced it at the end of the conference and invited people to join us.

So after a beautiful day out I spent the evening with a bunch of Apache related guys and girls having drinks and great pizza: We had several svn committers, Greg Stein met us there - he arrived today for the svn conference. Of couse the usual suspects were there as well: Simon Willnauer and his wife, Torsten Curdt, Erik Abele, Thomas Wöhlke, Valerie Hajdik. In addition we had guests from the Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop communities: Sarah Sproehnle and Aaron Kimball as well as Uwe Schindler joined us.

Thanks to Torsten for putting the meetup together. See you next time in July. If you are interested in joining our meetups: Subscribe to our mailing list.

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache, berlinbuzzwords, Dinner, Hadoop, Lucene

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

This evening a bunch of Apache committers and friends gathered in Berlin Kreuzberg at “Goodmorning Vietnam” for tasty food, nice drinks - or put another way, for a very nice evening. Simon had booked the table - we were expecting no more than eight people. However, as with any user group these meetup tends to grow. Shortly after the appointed time we had to move to another table to fit everyone around. See below for a quick shot taken while eating (Thanks to Eric for taking the picture):

There were people from Lucene, from SVN, Cocoon, CouchDB, HttpComponents and various other projects. Even one potential future Mahout committer Counting attendees quickly I guess we were about fifteen people.

Looking forward to the next meetup that will be scheduled to take place shortely after Buzzwords. Please talk to Torsten Curdt if you want to get notified or simply subscribe to our mailing list.

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache, Berlin, Dinner

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

Today, the April Apache Dinner took place in Berlin. We met at Sadhu - an Indian restaurant in Berlin X-Berg. We were six people: Lars Trieloff from Day Software, Simon Willnauer and Vera from Lucene, Torsten Curdt - currently Freelancer and Daniel Naber from Lucene as well.

With great food, nice discussions and a first glimpse on the submissions for Berlin Buzzwords it quickly got later and later

If you are Apache Committer/Member yourself or are simply interested in learning more about this crazy bunch of software developers meeting each month in a different restaurant, please contact Torsten for more information on the meetup - and to be included on the next meetup schedule. As we are by far more than ten people interested in delicious food and meeting other “indians in Berlin”, I created a Dinner mailing list - please join, if you plan to take part in the dinner in the near future.

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache, Berlin, Dinner

Next Monday at 7p.m. the April Apache Dinner Berlin is scheduled to take place. Thanks to Torsten Curdt for organising the dinner - as in: Contacting people, finding a suitable data, booking the location etc.

Looking forward to another nice evening at an awesome restaurant with tasty indian food. If you’d like to join us, please contact Torsten to be included in the next announcement mail. The dinner is not restricted to Apache people from Berlin: Anyone who is fine joining a group of geeks and free software hackers for dinner is invited to join us. If you are Apache developer planning to visit Berlin in the coming months, please contact Torsten so we can try to schedule the respective dinner to match your calendar.

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache, Berlin