With a little help from my friends
The end of the year 2009 is quickly approaching. To me it feels a little like it ran away far too quickly. So instead of taking part in the annual review of past events, I would like to use it as an opportunity to say thank you: The past twelve months were a lot of fun with lots of interesting, nice people from all over the world. I got the chance to meet quite a bit of the Mahout community, I got lots and lots of new developers from all over Germany - or more precisely the EU - to attend the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin. The interest in Mahout has grown tremendously over the past year.
All of this would not have been possible without the help of many people: First of all I’d like to thank Thilo Fromm - for making me happy whenever I was disappointed, for solacing me when I when I was sad, for patiently listening to me nervously whining before each and every talk, for kindly reviewing my slides and last but not least for helping me fix some of the problems that bugged me. Oh - and, thanks for helping me fix the issue in the zookeeper c-client within minutes that puzzled me for days.
Another big Thanks goes to family, first and foremost my mum, who kindly took care of organizing quite a bit of my paperwork and kept me on schedule with so many “unimportant” tasks like getting an appointment with some hospital to finally get the screws taken out of my knee 
A special thanks goes to the growing Mahout community as well as to the Lucene people - you know, who you are - keep up the great work: You rock!
Furthermore there are students at TU Berlin who have shown that with Mahout it is “dead-simple” to write an application that, given a stream of documents, groups them by topic and makes the result searchable in Solr. Thanks to you for solving the minor and major problems, for communicating with the community, for transparently communicating problems. Looking forward to continue working together with you next year.
Finally a big thank you to all of the speakers, sponsors and attendees of the Apache Hadopp Get Together, the NoSQL conference and the Apache Dinner Berlin - without you these events would never have been possible. Looking forward to seeing you again in January/ March 2010!
I hope I didn’t forget too many people - just in case: I am pretty grateful for all the input, help and feedback I got this year.
PS: Another thanks to the spaceboyz visiting Berlin for 26C3 for helping Thilo tidy up our apartment after Congress was over this year