Inductive Bias

Title: Hadoop User Group UK
Location: London/ Sun Office
Link out: Click here
Date: 2009-04-14

Johan Oskarsson is organising the second Hadoop User Group UK in London in April this year. The schedule is already up:

• Tom White (Cloudera): Practical MapReduce
• Michael Stack (Powerset): Apache HBase
• Isabel Drost (ASF): Introducing Apache Mahout
• Iadh Ounis and Craig Macdonald (University of Glasgow): Terrier
• Paolo Castagna (HP): “Having Fun with PageRank and MapReduce”

Tickets are free but limited. So better register soon. Looking forward to seeing you there.

General, Hadoop User Group UK Event, Hadoop, Software Foundation

Title: FSFE Meetup Berlin
Location: newthinking store
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-03-12

The FSFE Berlin group is going to meet next Thursday. Topics to discuss at the next Get Together are

• Document Freedom Day activities.
• This year is the year of elections in Germany. How do we get the topic of Free Software into the discussion?

Feel free to visit the wiki, drop by and take part in the discussions. After the meetup we will go to some restaurant close by for food and drinks.

General Event, Free Software

As software development cycles become ever shorter more and more companies adopt agile development methods. In many cases companies have switched to using Scrum or are still transitioning from less flexible approaches.

Since last summer Marion Eickmann is organising a Scrum Roundtable in Berlin. The goal is to discuss advantages and problems when introducing and practicing Scrum. But discussions on Scrum itself are also welcome.

Last Tuesday Thilo Fromm gave a presentation on his experiences introducing Scrum in his project. Thilo is project manager and developer at a company developing video surveillance hardware and software. He first gave an overview of the development process traditionally used in the company. Then he described how projects changed over the course of the last few years and how this caused new challenges to software development. Finally Thilo explained the status of implementing Scrum in one of his projects. He finished with (very positive reactions) from various teams in his company.

Slides are available online: Thilo Fromm: Scrum in the Waterfall

The talk was followed by very interesting discussions on this exact implementation of Scrum as well as experiences of other participants using Scrum for their projects. Discussions were accompanied by really great italian food.

The next roundtable will be announced on the blog of Agile42.

Scrum Scrum

Since last summer, newthinking store Berlin is hosting a Hadoop Meetup every quarter of the year. The scope of these user group meetings is not only on Hadoop projects but deals with technologies necessary with storing, processing and searching large amounts of data.

The meeting last Thursday featured a talk by Lars George on his experiences using HBase in customer projects as early as in 2007. His talk discussed his requirements for a distributed database. He then explained the basics of HBase and described his experiences using the software for customer projects. Bottom line for me is that although in a very early stage the project does provide a lot of value: Instead of re-implementing your own solution it is possible to benefit from the efforts of others. One thing I consider especially remarkable is the effort of the HBase community helping users in case they run into problems.

The second talk was from Jan Lehnardt on CouchDB. Jan explained the main design goals of the system. He detailed the architecture of CouchDB. Then he explained how Erlang made it possible to reach the goals in comparably short time.

The slides of the talks are both available online:

Lars George: HBase

Jan Lehnardt: CouchDB

The talks were followed by several questions and interesting discussions (with some beer in the Keyser Soze close by).

The next Get Together will be held in June 2009. Looking forward to see you in Berlin by then.

Get Together Hadoop, Software Foundation