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

The countdown started several weeks ago - finally in the past days the date for Berlin Buzzwords was announced, the call for submissions published. It’s exciting to see that the first talk is in already. Looking forward to yours.

Compared to last year there are two changes:

1. Submissions are no longer evaluated by Jan, Simon and myself only. Due to the large number of talks submitted last year we reached out for help to be able to split the task of reviewing talks.
2. Also the conference itself grew quite a bit in the past two years. As a result it now takes several full time positions to handle not only ticketing, hosting and software development, sponsorships, venue management, travel support, but also external communication and marketing. The team of newthinking grew quite a bit and is helping substantially with tasks that before were handled by Jan, Simon and myself exclusively to keep some of our time reserved for the fun part of schedule curation. Please make sure to include info@berlinbuzzwords.de if you have questions that need a quick answer.

We are looking forward to a successful community conference on all things scalable - be it search, NoSQL or data analytics. Don’t be afraid to submit highly technical talks - Berlin Buzzwords always has been a place for developers to discuss new technologies, algorithms and implementations.

If your community need more than just a day to meet - please do talk to us. We will be providing room for meetups on Wednesday after the conference. Those are handed out on a first come first serve basis.

If you are a local Berlin company and want to get Berlin Buzzwords into your offices, please talk to us - we are more than happy to get you in touch with one of the meetup organisers.

If you would like to co-locate trainings with Berlin Buzzwords - we are happy to co-promote you event. Talk to us to be included in our official schedule. In case you need any help organising your training, newthinking will be more than happy to provide their services for your event.

Looking forward to June: It’s amazing how large that event grew in the past two years - and almost scary to return back online after a flu and see how things unfolded magically.

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords

As a little reminder: the Call for presentations of Berlin Buzzwords will close next week on Tuesday, March 1st. Submissions on scalable search, data storage and analysis are all welcome. We are looking for presentations on the core technologies such as Apache Hadoop, CouchDB, Lucene, Redis, Voldemort but also talks on interesting use cases and system architectures.

Tickets are out for sale - don’t wait too long to get your early bird ticket.

In addition we are in the process of drafting some additional packages for those of you who would like to bring their non-tech spouse to the conference or need day care facilities for their children. If you are interested in either package please provide feedback on our blog.

Berlin Buzzwords bbuzz2011, Berlin Buzzwords

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.

Call for Presentations Berlin Buzzwords

http://berlinbuzzwords.de

Berlin Buzzwords 2011 - Search, Store, Scale

6/7 June 2011

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

After Berlin Buzzwords is over now, I thought it might be time to update a formerly published velocity graph. If you have been following this blog during the past few months you may know already, that we are using Scrum @ Home for several months already. I even published results of a Scrum Nokia test earlier this year.

Today I created another one of these nice velocity charts. What is interesting about this graph are two things. First of all: There are two spikes in the velocity graph. As our scrum board is used only for things done during our spare time, these spikes roughly correspond to German vacation days (Christmas and Easter).

More interestingly the work load shortely before Berlin Buzzwords happend was not much higher than usual. Weekend was totally free of any work - except for meeting with friends, going to town and attending the Barcamp. A sure sign of fantastic preparation and organisation with that few tasks left to do. Julia, thanks for helping with scheduling tasks such that no panicky late-night action was needed before, during or after the conference.

Scrum Berlin Buzzwords, Scrum

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 Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL, Software Foundation

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 Berlin Buzzwords, puzzles, schedule

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