Inductive Bias

This year was a blast: It started with the ever great FOSDEM in Brussels (see you there in 2013?), an invitation to GeeCon in Poznan (if you ever get an invitation to speak there - do accept, the organisers do an amazing job at that event). In summer we had Berlin Buzzwords in Berlin for the third time with 700 attendees (to retain the community feel to the conference we decided to limit tickets in 2013, so make sure you get your's early). In autumn I changed my name and afterwards spent two amazing weeks in Sydney, only to attend Strata EU afterwards. Finally in December I was invited to go through the most amazing submissions for Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam 2013 (it was incredibly hard to pick and choose - thanks to Sean and Torsten for assisting me with that choice for the Hadoop Applied track.)

I think I would have gone mad if it hadn't been for all the help from friends and family: A big hug to my husband for keeping me sane when ever times got a bit rough in terms of stuff in my calendar. Thanks for all your support throughout the year. Another huge hug to my family - in particular to my mom who early 2012 volunteered to take care of most of the local organisation of our wedding (we got married close to where I grew up) and put in several surprises that she "kept mum" about up to the very last second. Also everyone who helped fill your wedding magazine with content (and train my ma in dealing with all sorts of document formats containing that content in her mail box - me personally I was forbidden to even just touch her machine during the first nine months of 2012 ;) ).

Another thanks to David Obermann for a series of interesting talks at this year's Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin. It's amazing to see the event continue to grow even after essentially stepping down from being the main organiser.

Speaking of events: Another Thank You to Julia Gemählich, Claudia Brückner and the whole Berlin Buzzwords team. This was the first year I reduced the time I put into the event considerably - it was the first year I could attend the conference and not be all too tired to enjoy at least some of the presentations. You did a great job! Also thanks to my colleagues over at Nokia who provided me with a day a week to get things done for Buzzwords. In the same context: A very big thank you to every one who helped turn Berlin Buzzwords into a welcoming event for everyone: Thanks to all speakers, sponsors and attendees. Looking forward to seeing you again next year.

Finally a really big Thanks to all the people who helped turn our wedding day and vacation afterwards into the great time it was: Thanks to our families, our friends (including but not limited to the best photographer and friend I've met so far, those who hosted us in Sydney, and the many people who provided us with information on where to go and what to do.)

There's one thing though that bugged me by the end of this year:





So I decided that my New Year's resolution for 2013 would be to ramp up the time I spend on Apache one way or another: At least as committer for Apache Mahout, Mentor for Apache Drill and as a Member of the foundation.

Wishing all of you a Happy New Year - and looking forward to another successful Berlin Buzzwords in 2013.

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 ;)