Inductive Bias

I’ve heard of several people who are not quite sure yet whether they should visit Berlin Buzzwords or not - in particular when having to travel far and cross 9 time zones to attend. My general recommendation is to plan to spend some more days in Europe. The conference is conveniently scheduled on Monday and Tuesday which gives you one weekend before to explore the city and the whole week afterwards to go and see more either in the city or around.

In case you are wondering whether the city is a worthy destination when travelling with children - below is a list of things to do and places to go I sent to someone recently. Hope it helps with your decision as well. In general the city is pretty green, there are several locations specially amenable to a visit with kids - so treat the list below as what it is: An incomplete listing of some of the most obvious locations that might be of interest collected by someone who knows a few parents and their children. Also in case you speak German make sure to check out one of the many guide books for Berlin with children available in local book stores - Dussmann and Hugendubel generally have the largest selection though Chatwins is my preferred one for anything about travelling.

In the city

In case of good weather:

• Tierpark Berlin - make sure you visit Tierpark (not Zoo) - it’s much larger and friendlier. See also images taken by Berlin Buzzwords fotographer Philipp, general images.

• There is a huge park in walking distance of Brandenburger Tor: Tiergarten for recreation after sight seeing.
• For swimming head over to either Wannsee or Schlachtensee
• For exploring a NSA listening station head west to Teufels-berg
• On warm evenings plan for some time at Maybachufer

For bad weather:

• If your kids like tech go to Technik Museum (it features one of the first computer (the one built by Zuse that is))

• If you kids like nature go to Naturkunde Museum
• If you are interested in science - make sure to be here for the long night of science (web page may need google translate unless you speak German.)
• For a city tour check out the following scribbles - they also include some interesting parts of the bus line 100 and 200

Close to the city:

If you have some more time to spend make sure you also explore the closer surroundings:

• 80km north: rent a canoo and explore Mecklenburg
• 200km north: visit Rügen, spend some time swimming, some time to see the amazing chalk cliffs, some time to see the isle by bike
• 250km south: go hiking or rafting in Elbsandsteingebirge
• 80km south: rent a canoo and explore the canals in Spreewald

Hope to see you in Berlin in June. If you need more information or recommendations don’t hesitate to ask.

Berlin Buzzwords, Relocating to Berlin Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, ostsee, paddeln, ruegen, Spreewald, vacation

Berlin currently is of growing interest for software engineers, has a very active startup scene and as a result several community organised meetups. Listed below is a short, “highly objective” selection of local user groups - showing just the breadth of topics discussed.

• Berlin DevOps
• Berlin Buzzwords (conference, no meetup)
• Berlin Scrumtisch
• Java User Group Berlin/Brandenburg
• Berlin Google Technology User Group
• Atlassian Usergroup Berlin/Brandenburg
• Erlang meetup Berlin
• Clojure Meetup Berlin
• Django user group
• FSFE Berlin
• Berlin.js

If you want to discover new meetups: It helps attending one that is closest to your interest as usually people follow several user groups. In addition watching the scheduled event at co-working and hacker spaces like co-up Berlin, betahaus, c-base can help.

General, Relocating to Berlin Berlin, Meetups

First of all please note that meetup organisation is being transitioned over to our xing meetup group. So in order to be notified of future meetings, make sure to join that group. Please make also sure to register for the December event as in contrast to past meetups this time space will be limited, so make sure to grab a ticket. If you cannot make it, please let the organiser know so he can issue additional tickets.

For those of you currently following this blog only for announcements:

When: December 7th 2011, 7 p.m.

Where: Smarthouse GmbH, Erich-Weinert-Str. 145, 10409 Berlin

Speaker: Martin Scholl
Title: On Firehoses and Storms: Event Thinking, Event Processing

Speaker: Douwe Osinga
Title: Overview of the Data Processing Pipeline at Triposo

Looking forward to seeing you at the next Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin in December.

Get Together Berlin, Get Together, Hadoop

Apache Hadoop receives lots of attention from large US corporations who are using the project to scale their data processing pipelines:

“Facebook uses Hadoop and Hive extensively to process large data sets. [...]” (Ashish Thusoo, Engineering Manager at Facebook), “Hadoop is a key ingredient in allowing LinkedIn to build many of our most computationally difficult features [...]” (Jay Kreps, Principal Engineer, LinkedIn), “Hadoop enables [Twitter] to store, process, and derive insights from our data in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. [...]” (Kevin Weil, Analytics Lead, Twitter). Found on Yahoo developer blog.

However the system’s use is not limited to large corporations only: With 101tec, Zanox, nugg.ad, nurago also local German players are using the project to enable new applications. Add components like Lucene, Redis, CouchDB, HBase and UIMA to the mix and you end up with a set of majour open source components that allow developers to rapidly develop systems that until a few years ago were possible only either in Google-like companies or in research.

The Berlin Apache Hadoop Get Together started in 2008 allowed to learn more on how the average local company leveraged this software. It is a platform to get in touch informally, exchange knowledge and best practices across corporate boundaries.

After three years of organising that event it is time to hand it over to new caring hands: David Obermann from Idealo kindly volunteered to take over organisation. He is a long-term attendee of the event and will continue it in the roughly the same spirit as before: Technical talks on success stories by users, new features by developers - not solely restricted to Hadoop only but also taking into account related projects.

A huge Thank You for taking up the work of co-ordinating, finding a venue and a sponsor for the videos goes to David! If any of you attending the event think that you have an interesting story to share, would like to support the event financially or just help out please get in touch with David.

Looking forward to the next Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin. Watch this space for updates on when and where it will take place.

Get Together Apache Hadoop Get Together, Berlin, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL, Scaling

Title: Apache Dinner Berlin
Location: Good Morning Vietnam X-Berg
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-02-28

Please contact Simon Willnauer if you would like to attend for further information.

Apache Dinner Berlin Apache Dinner, Berlin

Get Together Berlin, Get Together, Hadoop, Video

Get Together Apache Hadoop, Apache Hadoop Get Together, Berlin, Video

This is to announce the Berlin Buzzwords 2011. The second edition of the successful 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:

• IR / 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: March 1st 2011, 23:59 MEZ
• Notification of accepted speakers: March 22th, 2011, MEZ.
• Publication of final schedule: April 5th, 2011.
• Conference: June 6/7. 2011

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-0 no later than March 1st, 2011. Acceptance notifications will be sent out soon after the submission deadline. 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 lightning (10min), short (20min) or long (40min) 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.) If you’d like to pitch your brand new product in your talk, please let us know as well - there will be extra space for presenting new ideas, awesome products and great new projects.

The presentation format is short. 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 @berlinbuzzwords 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 Please re-distribute this CfP to people who might be interested.

Contact us at:

newthinking communications GmbH
Schönhauser Allee 6/7
10119 Berlin, Germany
Julia Gemählich
Isabel Drost
+49(0)30-9210 596

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, hbase, Lucene, Mahout

Early next year - on February 19th/20th to be more precise - the first Apache Mahout Hackathon is scheduled to take place at c-base. The Hackathon will take one weekend. There will be plenty of time to hack on your favourite Mahout issue, to get in touch with two of the Mahout committers and get your machine learning project off the ground.

Please contact isabel@apache.org if you are planning to attend this event or register with the xing event so we can plan for enough space for everyone. If you have not registered for the event there is now guarantee you will be admitted.

If you’d like to support the event: We are still looking for sponsors for drinks and pizza.

Mahout Berlin, cbase, Hackathon, Hadoop, Mahout

Winter arrived in Germany - below a few pictures I took last Thursday morning:

Seems like this season winter is trying real hard to prove that I am wrong saying that there is no real winter in Berlin with just about a week snow on the streets Guess its time to get the tires with spikes back on my bike.

Freetime Berlin, snow, winter