Inductive Bias

Explaining social media tracking

Tue, 19 May 2026 14:29:28 +0200

Nothing to hide? The business model of cost free web services # Following my mantra to put online behind a public URL what I share more than twice: The following are three + two presentations that dig deeper into the business model of advertising financed online services that people can use without paying money that in the past I have consistently shared with friends and aquaintances to explain what’s broken about this business model from the perspective of “independent media is one of the corner stones of a free and open society”.

Netzwerkfrühstück: Open Source in der Verwaltung

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 12:29:28 +0200

Netzwerkfrühstück: Open Source in der Verwaltung # Networking breakfast: Open Source in public admin (at German “Smart country convention” Berlin). Back in August, in the middle of my vacation, I got an e-mail from plain schwarz asking if I would be willing to give a brief talk at an event they were organising about open source. All I needed to do was get back to them within a week and coordinate in a quick call.

Playing with LLMs locally

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 16:07:28 +0100

Playing with LLMs locally # After a talk by Nick Burch at Berlin Buzzwords I finally got started playing with LLMs locally. The easiest way to get started for me: llm tool by Simon Willison :) Backstory # Back when it came out in winter 2022 I started playing around with ChatGPT - mostly to generate texts from individual terms given as what teachers in German primary schools call “learning words” - usually they are handed out for pupils to get prepared for a dictation (written to check spelling skills): It’s a lot more fun to prepare for theses tests with fun texts than with mere lists of words :) Back then the results were impressive - but also frightning given the implications for ease of generating mis-information, fake social media profiles, spamming search indeces and more.

PyCon/ PyData DE - Invited to give a keynote

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 19:29:28 +0200

How I was invited to give a keynote in Darmstadt # It was autumn 2009 at an ApacheCon in Oakland/ California: I asked one of my fellow ASF people what it would take to get him to visit Berlin. The flippant, not quite serious, joking answer: “Someone to fund for my flight tickets.” Fast forward six months. I got back to that lovely person with a newly created Berlin Buzzwords conference and enough sponsorship budget to pay for keynote speaker travel.

Visiting the Bundestag

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 15:38:28 +0200

Visiting (and speaking at) the German Bundestag # Many, many years ago, I invited Berlin Buzzwords keynote speakers to join me for lunch pre-conference. For the view – and the impact of the location – I reserved a table at the restaurant that is located atop the Reichstags-building here in Berlin. If back then anyone had told me that one day I’d get an invitation to speak as an expert in the committee for digital issues of the German Bundestag, I wouldn’t have believed a single word!

Learning German in Berlin

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 17:38:28 +0200

Learning German in Berlin # So you have been living in Berlin for a while, maybe even for years – but you fail to speak German fluently. It may feel weird switching to German even with friends, as your English gives you many more options to speak proficiently, to be precise when talking. People around you speak better English than you speak German. One thing to remember: While Berlin is easy to navigate speaking only English, if you stay here for more than a couple of weeks you really truly do want to start training your German language skills: Emergency information – typically first available and more detailed in German.

Notes on meetups

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 15:38:28 +0200

Notes on meetup organisation # What feels like decades ago I went to a talk at FOSDEM. One in a dev-room. And one of the very few that proved relevant for many years after. I have no idea what the title was, nor what year it was given, I do believe it ran in the MySQL dev room - in terms of topic it provided an overview on what to do and what to watch out for when organising community meetups.

Open Source, InnerSource, CRA?

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 17:17:00 +0200

Open Source, InnerSource, CRA? # A couple days ago on Mastodon I read a post from by Robert Sander (here translated from German): “At FrOSCon I got the impression the FLOSS community is aging together. Where are people in their mid-twenties, new people entering the community?” “Entering the open source community” - what does that even mean? Does it mean creating a public GitHub repo and publishing source code there?

useful ospo links

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 02:07:28 +0100

Some useful OSPO links # https://todogroup.org/ … TODO group of Linux Foundation generally collecting material around OSPOs and getting people interested in the topic together https://github.com/github/github-ospo/?tab=readme-ov-file … OSPO policy templates as published by GitHub’s OPSO Documentation skeleton … skeleton for things to document in an OSS project. Quilin … a starter project template for Open Source, and likely InnerSource, projects Keeping the above here to not loose them when cleaning my open tabs.

How hard can it be: Open Source contributions

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:13:12 +0100

How hard can it be: Open Source contributions # “Sharing is caring - if only more downstream users simply contributed to the open source software that they depend upon.” - a thought that has crossed my mind more than once in the past decades. Except - for your average software engineer in industry “contributing to open source” is anything but simple. In addition it’s anything but obvious why - on top of daily work - one should commit time to open source.

Reboot blogging

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:17:00 +0200

Reboot blogging? # March 2009 - according to the history of the posts that’s when I started writing entries for my own blog. Twitter was three years old and of little more use than sharing where people were at the moment, which food they were eating.YouTube was just four years old. It was also the year I started the Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin, back then in the famous Newthinking Store - a meetup before meetups were called meetups in a co-working space long before the concept of a coworking space gained traction.

An update to the 'Children tinkering' after >10years

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 19:37:00 +0200

Children tinkering, part 2 # Roughly a decade ago I wrote a short post about children tinkering. A lot of the advice from back then is still valid today. I just noticed that ten years later there are a few more things one could look into: Instead of only being a subtrack of FrOSCon, Froglabs have turned into Teckids e.V. - including online fora, a yearly week for an off-site and several side tracks of Chemnitzer Linuxtage, FrOSCon and FOSS events in Graz.

A short, incomprehensive history of spam and counter measures

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:38:28 +0200

A short, incomprehensive history of spam and counter measures # “… it should be clear that improvements in communication tend to divide mankind …” by Harold Innis in Changing Concepts of Time This post was triggered by multiple conversations in my big data circle of friends. All conversations agreed on some important topics: Social media sites these days are influential on the daily life of people globally. With that influence comes an incentive to use these sites to influence behaviour and public opinion.

InnerSource Commons Board of Directors - a retrospective

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 20:06:06 +0100

InnerSource Commons Board of Directors - a retrospective # In the last years I had the honour of serving on the InnerSource Commons board of directors. I was one of the founding board members. Thank you to Danese Cooper for inviting me to that: I still remember sitting in the subway on my way to work years ago reading her question of whether I wanted to be founding member of the InnerSource Commons.

When it takes a pandemic ...

Tue, 25 May 2021 20:12:03 +0200

When it takes a pandemic … # to understand the speed of innovation. 2020 was a special year for all of us - with “us” here meaning the entire world: Faced with a truly urgent global problem that year was a learning opportunity for everyone. For me personally the year started like any other year - except that news coming out of China were troubling. Little did I know how fast those news would reach the rest of the world - little did I know the impact that this would have.

Apache Board of Directors - a retrospective

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 20:06:06 +0100

Apache Board of Directors - a retrospective # Last term I had the honour of serving on the ASF board of directors, better explained in context of the ASF governance structure. As quite a few directors (myself included) declined to run for the board this year again, I thought it would be a good idea to think about the past term, write that down and publish those thoughts. As I wanted to give every board member a chance to respond, I shared some guiding questions but left it to board members to choose the channel they deemed most appropriate to share their responses on.

FrOSCon 2018

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 18:34:49 +0200

FrOSCon 2018 # A more general summary: https://tech.europace.de/froscon-2018/ of the conference written in German. Below a more detailed summary of the keynote by Lorena Jaume-Palasi. In her keynote “Blessed by the algorithm - the computer says no!” Lorena detailed the intersection of ethics and technology when it comes to automated decision making systems. As much as humans with a technical training shy away from questions related to ethics, humans trained in ethics often shy away from topics that involve a technical layer.

DataworksSummit Berlin - Wednesday morning

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:50:41 +0200

DataworksSummit Berlin - Wednesday morning # Data strategy - cloud strategy - business strategy: Aligning the three was one of the main themes (initially put forward in his opening keynote by CTO of Hortonworks Scott Gnau) thoughout this weeks Dataworks Summit Berlin kindly organised and hosted by Hortonworks. The event was attended by over 1000 attendees joining from 51 countries. The inspiration hat was put forward in the first keynote by Scott was to take a closer look at the data lifecycle - including the fact that a lot of data is being created (and made available) outside the control of those using it: Smart farming users are using a combination of weather data, information on soil conditions gathered through sensors out in the field in order to inform daily decisions.

Apache Breakfast

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 09:39:24 +0200

Apache Breakfast # In case you missed it but are living in Berlin - or are visiting Berlin/ Germany this week: A handful of Apache people (committers/ members) are meeting over breakfast on Friday morning this week. If you are interested in joining, please let me know (or check yourself - in the archives of the mailing list party@apache.org)

FOSS Backstage - Schedule online

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 09:27:09 +0200

FOSS Backstage - Schedule online # In January the CfP for FOSS Backstage opened. By now reviews have been done, speakers notified and a schedule created. I’m delighted to find both - a lot of friends from the Apache Software Foundation but also a great many speakers that aren’t affiliated with the ASF among the speakers. If you want to know how Open Source really works, if you want to get a glimpse behind the stage, do not wait for too long to grab your ticket now and join us in summer in Berlin/ Germany.

My board nomination statement 2018

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 08:21:15 +0100

My board nomination statement 2018 # Two days ago the Apache Software Foundation members meeting started. One of the outcomes of each members meeting is an elected board of directors. The way that works is explained here: Annual Apache members meeting. As explained in the linked post, members accepting their nomination to become a director are supposed to provide a nomination statement. This year they were also asked to answer a set of questions so members could better decide who to vote for.

An argument against proxies

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 18:53:09 +0100

An argument against proxies # Proxies? In companies getting started with an upstream first concept this is what people are called who act as the only interface between their employer and an open source project: All information from any project used internally flows through them. All bug reports and patches intended as upstream contribution also flows through them - hiding entire teams producing the actual contributions. At Apache projects I learnt to dislike this setup of having proxies act in place of the real contributors.

FOSDEM 2018 - recap

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 07:13:20 +0100

FOSDEM 2018 - recap # Too crowded, too many queues, too little space - but also lots of friendly people, Belgian waffles, ice cream, an ASF dinner with grey beards and new people, a busy ASF booth, bumping into friends every few steps, meeting humans you see only online for an entire year or more: For me, that’s the gist of this year’s FOSDEM. Note: German version of the article including images appeared in my employer’s tech blog.

FOSS Backstage - CfP open

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 17:21:31 +0100

FOSS Backstage - CfP open # It’s almost ten years ago that I attended my first ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam. I wasn’t entirely new to the topic of open source or free software. I attended several talks on Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Hadoop, Tomcat, httpd (I still remember that the most impressive stories didn’t necessarily come from the project members, but from downstream users. They were the ones authorized to talk publicly about what could be done with the project - and often became committers themselves down the road.

Trust and confidence

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 06:48:23 +0100

Trust and confidence # One of the main principles at Apache (as in The Apache Software Foundation) is “Community over Code” - having the goal to build projects that survive single community members loosing interest or time to contribute. In his book “Producing Open Source Software” Karl Fogel describes this model of development as Consensus-based Democracy (in contrast to benevolent dictatorship): “Consensus simply means an agreement that everyone is willing to live with.

Open Source Summit - Day 3

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 09:35:15 +0100

Open Source Summit - Day 3 # Open source summit Wednesday started with a keynote by members of the Banks family telling a packed room on how they approached raising a tech family. The first hurdle that Keila (the teenage daughter of the family) talked about was something I personally had never actually thought about: Communication tools like Slack that are in widespread use come with an age restriction excluding minors.

Open source summit - Day 2

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:58:31 +0200

Open source summit - Day 2 # Day two of Open Source summit for me started a bit slow for lack of sleep. The first talk I went to was on “Developer tools for Kubernetes” by Michelle Noorali and Matt Butcher. Essentially the two of them showed two projects (Draft and Brigade to help ease development apps for Kubernetes clusters. Draft here is the tool to use for developing long running, daemon like apps.

Open Source Summit Prague 2017 - part 1

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 13:18:47 +0200

Open Source Summit Prague 2017 - part 1 # Open Source Summit, formerly known as LinuxCon, this year took place in Prague. Drawing some 2000 attendees to the lovely Czech city, the conference focussed on all things Linux kernel, containers, community and governance. The first day started with three crowded keynotes: First one by Neha Narkhede on Keynotes Apache Kafka and the Rise of the Streaming Platform. Second one by Reuben Paul (11 years old) on how hacking today really is just childs play: The hack itself might seem like toying around (getting into the protocol of children's toys in order to make them do things without using the app that was intended to control them).

Open development and inner source for fun and profit

Fri, 26 May 2017 09:17:16 +0200

Open development and inner source for fun and profit # Last in a row if interesting talks at Adobe Open Source Summit was on Open Development/ Inner Source and how it benefits internal projects given by Michael Marth. Note: He knows there’s subtle differences between inner source and open development, but mentioned to use the terms interchangeably in his talk. So what is inner source all about? Essentially: Use all the tools and processes that already work for open source projects, just internally.

Note to self - slides for staying sane when maintaining a popular open source project

Fri, 26 May 2017 09:00:04 +0200

Note to self - slides for staying sane when maintaining a popular open source project # For further reference - Simon MacDonald has a great collection of good advise on how to stay sane when running and maintaining a popular open source project. Link here: http://s.apache.org/sanity Some things he mentioned: Include a README. It should tell people what the project is about but also what the project is not about.

Async decision making

Tue, 16 May 2017 08:45:35 +0200

Async decision making # This is the second in a series of posts on inner source/open source. Bertrand Delacretaz gave an interesting talk on how to avoid meetings by introducing an async way of making decisions. He started off with a little anecdote related to Paul Graham’s maker’s vs. manager’s schedule: Bertrand’s father was a carpenter. He was working in the same house that his family was living in, so joining the family for lunch was common for him.

Notebook - OSS office at Adobe

Fri, 12 May 2017 08:46:30 +0200

Notebook - OSS office at Adobe # tl;dr: This post summarises what I learnt at the Adobe Open Source Summit last week about which aspects to think of when running an open source office. It’s mainly a mental note for myself, hopefully others will find it useful as well. Longer version: This is another post in a series of articles on “random stuff I leant in Basel last week”. When I was invited to Adobe’s open source summit I had no idea what to expect from it.

Agile, inner source, open development, open source development

Sun, 07 May 2017 17:53:53 +0200

Agile, inner source, open development, open source development # Last week I had the honour of giving a keynote at Adobe’s Open Source Summit EU in Basel. Among many interesting talks they hosted a panel to answer questions around all things open source, strategy, inner source, open development. One of the questions I found intersting is how inner source/ open development and agile are related. To get everyone on the same page, what do I mean when talking about inner source/ open development?

Note to self: Backup bottlenecks

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:26:47 +0100

Note to self: Backup bottlenecks # I learnt the following relations the hard way 10 years ago when trying to backup a rather tiny amount of data, went through the computation again three years ago. Still I had to re-do the computation this morning when trying to pull a final full backup from my old MacBook. Posting here for future reference: Note 1: Some numbers like 10BASE-T included only for historic reference.

How hard can it be - organising a conference

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:37:07 +0100

How hard can it be - organising a conference # Setup a CfP, select a few talks, publish a schedule, book a venue, sell a few tickets - have fun: Essentially all it takes to organise a conference, isn’t it? In theory maybe - in practice - not so much. Without scaring you away from running your own here’s my experience with setting up Berlin Buzzwords (after two years of running the Berlin Hadoop Get Together, putting up a NoSQL half day meetup).

Berlin Buzzwords - Associated Events

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 17:00:35 +0100

Berlin Buzzwords - Associated Events # Back in 2011 I had a weird idea: Berlin Buzzwords as a core event kicks off on Sunday evening with a Barcamp but closes on Tuesday evening. There’s way too little time to meet with all the interesting people. On the other hand the organising team really was all tired on Tuesday evening, so just adding another day at the end wasn’t really an option.

I love FS 2014

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 16:49:25 +0100

I love FS 2014 # It’s that day of the year again: Time to buy flowers and chocolate for your beloved one. However as with previous years, FSFE wants you to put the day to good use to also celebrate your favourite free software developer (you know, the people who get way more bug reports and complaints than positive feedback): So here’s to the people over at Apache, Debian, Eclipse, Elasticsearch, Linux, ZeroMQ and the many other projects that make my life easier: Happy I love Free Software Day - get yourself celebrated!

FOSDEM 2014

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 14:53:08 +0100

FOSDEM 2014 # By now FOSDEM turned into some kind of tradition in our family: Since 2007 every year in February we are travelling to that one comfy B&B in Brussels for a weekend - not to take a closer look at the city but to attend (together with thousands of other geeks and open source hackers) one of the biggest conferences on all things open source. I love the conference concept for scaling: As it happens on a university campus they only have a limited number of huge rooms, but a fairly large number of mid-sized and small rooms.

On being aggressivly public

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 19:06:54 +0100

On being aggressivly public # If it didn't happen on the mailing list it didn't happen at all. ... with all it's implications this seems to be the hardest lesson for newcomers to the Apache way of development to learn. In the minimal sense it means that any decision a project takes has to be taken publicly, preferably in some archived, searchable medium. In a wider sense it's usually interpreted as: .

Scientific debugging - take 2

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 20:13:57 +0100

Scientific debugging - take 2 # Back in - OMG was that really back in 2010? - 2010 I wrote a post on scientific debugging. Today I was reminded of this post as I actually had the pleasure of watching this principle carried out - except this was for a medical “bug” instead of one in a piece of software. To quote the book Why programs fail the method of scientific debugging consists of 5 easy to follow steps:

Children tinkering

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 02:07:59 +0100

Children tinkering # Years ago I decided that in case I got the same question for at least three times I would write down the answer and put it somewhere online in a more or less public location that I can link to. The latest question I got once too often came from daddies (mostly, sorry - not even a handful of moms around me, let alone moms who are into tech) looking for ways to get there children in touch with technology.

Don't dream it, be it

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 12:07:36 +0100

Don’t dream it, be it # After two years in a row of receiving 120 submissions for Berlin Buzzwords from the usual crowd - young, white, male, caucasian - only this year we decided we needed to work towards increasing diversity.One piece in the puzzle was to get in touch with several Berlin local “tech for non-tech” people groups. In a content exchange kind of setting I was asked to do an interview as some kind of role model.

On geeks growing up

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 05:49:53 +0100

On geeks growing up # I’m a regular visitor of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage in March - at first going to talks learning lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know about like aspect oriented programming, strace, squeak, which open source licenses are best for different strategies. As of late I had been there mostly to help out with the FSFE booth. For context: The conference itself is hosted by the technical university in Chemnitz, it takes place on a weekend, they charge the tiny amount of 5 Euros for admission.

Hello elasticsearch

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 20:17:49 +0100

Hello elasticsearch # First of all a disclaimer: I had a little bit of time left during the last few weeks. As a result my blog migrated from dynamic wordpress content to statically hosted pages. If anything looks odd, in case you find any encoding issues, if you miss specific functionality - please do let me know. I’ll switch from this beta url back to the old sub-domain in a week or so unless there are major complaints.

Building online communities - from the 0MQ trenches

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:38:58 +0100

Building online communities - from the 0MQ trenches # After seeing several talks on how open source communitites are organised at FOSDEM, on how to license open source software strategically at Chemnitzer Linuxtage and on how to nurture open source communities at Berlin Buzzwords over the past couple of years during the past year or so I’ve come to read quite a few articles and books on the art of building online communities.

Wonder if you should switch from your RDBMS to Apache Hadoop: Don't!

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 17:10:58 +0200

Wonder if you should switch from your RDBMS to Apache Hadoop: Don’t! # Last weekend I spend a lot of fun time at FrOSCon* in Sankt Augustin - always great to catch up with friends in the open source space. As always there were quite a few talks on NoSQL, Hadoop, but also really solid advise on tuning your system for stuff like MySQL (including a side note on PostgreSQL and Oracle) from Kristian Köhntopp.

JAX: Project Nashorn

Fri, 24 May 2013 20:41:00 +0200

JAX: Project Nashorn # The last talk I went to was on project Nashorn - demonstrating the capability to run dynamic languages on the JVM by writing a JavaScript implementation as a proof of concept that is fully ECMA compliant and still performs better than Mozilla’s project Rhino. It was nice to see Lisp, created in 1962, referenced as being the first language that featured a JIT compiler as well as garbage collection.

JAX: Tales from production

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:38:57 +0200

JAX: Tales from production # In a second presentation Peter RoÃbach together with Andreas Schmidt provided some more detail on what the topic logging entails in real world projects. Development messages turn into valuable information needed to uncover issues and downtime of systems, capacity planning, measuring the effect of software changes, analysing resource usage under real world usage. In addition to these technical use cases there is a need to provide business metrics.

JAX: Logging best practices

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:37:59 +0200

JAX: Logging best practices # The ideal outcome of Peter RoÃbach’s talk on logging best practices was to have attendees leave the room thinking ``we know all this already and are applying it successfully’’ - most likely though the majority left thinking about how to implement even the most basic advise discussed. From his consultancy and fire fighter background he has a good overview of what logging in the average corporate environment looks like: No logging plan, no

JAX: Java performance myths

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:37:07 +0200

JAX: Java performance myths # This talk was one of the famous talks on Java performance myths by Arno Haase. His main point - supported with dozens of illustrative examples was for software developers to stop trusting in word of mouth, cargo cult like myths that are abundant among engineers. Again the goal should be to write readable code above all - for one the Java compiler and JIT are great at optimising.

JAX: Does parallel equal performant?

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:34:40 +0200

JAX: Does parallel equal performant? # In general there is a tendency to set parallel implementations to being equal to performant implementations. Except in the really naive case there is always going to be some overhead due to scheduling work, managing memory sharing and network communication overhead. Essentially that knowledge is reflected in Amdahl’s law (the amount of serial work limits the benefit from running parts of your implementation in parallel, http://en.

JAX: Pigs, snakes and deaths by 1k cuts

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:32:16 +0200

JAX: Pigs, snakes and deaths by 1k cuts # In his talk on performance problems Rainer Schuppe gave a great introduction to which kinds of performance problems can be observed in production and how to best root-cause them. Simply put performance issues usually arise due to a difference in either data volumn, concurrency levels or resource usage between the dev, qa and production environments. The tooling to uncover and explain them is pretty well known:

JAX: Java HPC by Norman Maurer

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:31:16 +0200

JAX: Java HPC by Norman Maurer # For slides see also: Speakerdeck: High performance networking on the JVM Norman started his talk clarifying what he means by high scale: Anything above 1000 concurrent connections in his talk are considered high scale, anything below 100 concurrent connections is fine to be handled with threads and blocking IO. Before tuning anything, make sure to measure if you have any problem at

JAX: Hadoop overview by Bernd Fondermann

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:29:57 +0200

JAX: Hadoop overview by Bernd Fondermann # After breakfast was over the first day started with a talk by Bernd on the Hadoop ecosystem. He did a good job selecting the most important and interesting projects related to storing data in HDFS and processing it with Map Reduce. After the usual "what is Hadoop", "what does the general architecture look like", "what will change with YARN" Bernd gave a nice overview of which

BigDataCon

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:29:03 +0200

BigDataCon # Together with Uwe Schindler I had published a series of articles on Apache Lucene at Software and Support Media's Java Mag several years ago. Earlier this year S&S kindly invited my to their BigDataCon - co-located with JAX to give a talk of my choosing that at least touches upon Lucene. Thinking back and forth about what topic to cover what came to my mind was to

Hadoop Summit Amsterdam

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:27:56 +0200

Hadoop Summit Amsterdam # About a month ago I attended the first European Hadoop Summit, organised by Hortonworks in Amsterdam. The two day conference brought together both vendors and users of Apache Hadoop for talks, exhibition and after conference beer drinking. Russel Jurney kindly asked me to chair the Hadoop applied track during Apache Con EU. As a result I had a good excuse to attend the event. Overall

ApacheConNA: Misc

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:26:39 +0200

ApacheConNA: Misc # In his talk on Spdy Mathew Steele explained how he implemented the spdy protocol as an Apache httpd module - working around most of the safety measures and design decisions in the current httpd version. Essentially to get httpd to support the protocol all you need now is mod_spdy plus a modified version of mod_ssl. The keynote on the last day was given by the Puppet founder.

ApacheConNA: Hadoop metrics

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:25:25 +0200

ApacheConNA: Hadoop metrics # Have you ever measured the general behaviour of your Hadoop jobs? Have you sized your cluster accordingly? Do you know whether your work load really is IO bound or CPU bound? Legend has it noone expecpt Allen Wittenauer over at Linked.In, formerly Y! ever did this analysis for his clusters. Steve Watt gave a pitch for actually going out into your datacenter measuring what is going on there and adjusting the deployment accordingly: In small

ApacheConNA: Monitoring httpd and Tomcat

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:23:23 +0200

ApacheConNA: Monitoring httpd and Tomcat # Monitoring - a task generally neglected - or over done - during development. But still vital enough to wake up people from well earned sleep at night when done wrong. Rainer Jung provided some valuable insights on how to monitor Apache httpd and Tomcat. Of course failure detection, alarms and notifications are all part of good monitoring. However so is avoidance of false positives and metric collection,

ApacheConNA: On Security

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:22:19 +0200

ApacheConNA: On Security # During the security talk at Apache Con a topic commonly glossed over by developers was covered in quite some detail: With software being developed that is being deployed rather widely online (over 50% of all websites are powered by the Apache webserver) natually security issues are of large concern. Currently there are eight trustworthy people on the foundation-wide security response team, subscribed to security@apache.org. The team was started by

ApacheConNA: On documentation

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:20:34 +0200

ApacheConNA: On documentation # In her talk on documentation on OSS Noirin gave a great wrap up of the topic of what documentation to create for a project and how to go about that task. One way to think about documentation is to keep in mind that it fulfills different tasks: There is conceptual, procedural and task-reference documentation. When starting to analyse your docs you may first want to debug

ApacheConNA: On delegation

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:19:51 +0200

ApacheConNA: On delegation # In her talk on delegation Deb Nicholson touched upon a really important topic in OSS: Your project may live longer than you are willing to support it yourself. The first important point about delegation is to delegate - and to not wait until you have to do it. Soon you will realise that mentoring and delegation actually is a way to multiply your resources. In order to delegate people to delegate to are needed.

ApacheConNA: First keynote

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:13:51 +0200

ApacheConNA: First keynote # All three ApacheCon keynotes were focussed around the general theme of open source communities. The first on given by Theo had very good advise to the engineer not only striving to work on open source software but become an excellent software developer: Be loyal to the problem instead of to the code: You shouldn't be addicted to any particular programming language or framework and refuse to work

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Wed, 08 May 2013 23:41:54 +0200

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # This evening I joined the group over at Immobilienscout 24 for today’s Hadoop Get Together. David Obermann had invited Dr. Falk-Florian Henrich from CeleraOne to talk about their real-time analytics on live data streams. Their system is being used by the New York Times Springer’s Die Welt for traffic analysis. The goal is to identify recurring users that might be willing to pay for the content they want to read.

ApacheConNA: Meet the indian tribe

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:10:58 +0200

ApacheConNA: Meet the indian tribe # ApacheCon is the ``User Conference of the Apache Software Foundation’’. What should that mean? If you are going to Apache Con you have the chance of meeting committers of your favourite projects as well as members of the foundation itself. Though there are a lot of talks that are interesting from a technical point of view the goal really is to turn you into an active member of the

How to get your submission accepted at Berlin Buzzwords

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:21:48 +0200

How to get your submission accepted at Berlin Buzzwords # Disclaimer: Intentionally posting on my private blog - these are my own criteria, not general advice from the review committee. Berlin Buzzwords is in it’s fourth year. Probably the most tedious task of all is having to select talks to make it into the final schedule. With roughly 120 submissions and roughly 30 slots to fill the result is that three quarters of all submissions have to be rejected.

Keepers of secrets - FOSDEM 09

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:49:49 +0100

Keepers of secrets - FOSDEM 09 # The closing keynote was given by Leslie Hawthorn whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year during Berlin Buzzwords. In her talk she shared insights into a topic commonly encountered in open source leadership that is way less often talked about than should be the case: Being in the role of a community leader people will talk to you about all sorts of confidential information and ask you to not share that information with other no matter how beneficial that might be for both parties.

On making Libre Office suck less – a major refactoring effort - FOSDEM 08

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:47:10 +0100

On making Libre Office suck less – a major refactoring effort - FOSDEM 08 # Libre Office is currently in a phase of code cleanup and refactoring that turns the whole code base upside down. What that means is that people need tooling to avoid quality from going down and allow for new features going in without too much risk. The project made good experiences with using gerrit for code review of patches, tinderbox for fast integration testing, strict whitespace checks to avoid unintended mistakes, use clang compiler plugins.

E17 - FOSDEM 07

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:46:25 +0100

E17 - FOSDEM 07 # I’m really glad the NoSQL room was all packed on afternoon – otherwise I’d have missed an amazing talk by people behind Enlightenment – a window manager that is older than Gnome, nearly older than KDE and has been my favourite choice for years and years (simply because they have sensible default configuration options: focus follows mouse, virtual desktops that allow for desktop switching when moving the mouse close to the screen edges, menu opening when clicking anywhere on the desktop background, options for remembering window placement and configuration on re-boot etc).

Systemd - FOSDEM 06

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:45:29 +0100

Systemd - FOSDEM 06 # As sort of a “go out of your comfort zone and discover new stuff” exercise I went to the systemd – two years later talk next. It’s just plain amazing to see a machine boot in roughly one second (that is not counting the 7s that the BIOS needs for initialization). The whole project started as a init-only project but has since grown to a much larger purpose: An init platform ranging from mobile, embedded, desktop devices to servers many features were just over-due across the board.

Notes on storage options - FOSDEM 05

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:43:06 +0100

Notes on storage options - FOSDEM 05 # On MySQL Second day at FOSDEM for me started with the MySQL dev room. One thing that made me smile was in the MySQL new features talk: The speaker announced support for “NoSQL interfaces” to MySQL. That is kind of fun in two dimensions: A) What he really means is support for the memcached interface. Given the vast number of different interfaces to databases today, announcing anything as “supports NoSQL interfaces” sounds kind of silly.

AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 20:41:23 +0100

AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04 # The panel started with a bit of history of the AGPL: Born in the age of growing ASP (application service provider) businesses AGPL tried to fix the hosting loop whole in GPL in the early 2000s. More than ten years later it turns out the license hasn’t quite caught traction: On the one hand the license does have a few wording issues.

Mozilla legal issues - FOSDEM 03

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 22:39:35 +0100

Mozilla legal issues - FOSDEM 03 # In the next talk Gervase Markham talked about his experience working for Mozilla on legal and license questions. First the speaker summarized what kind of requests he gets most: There are lots of technical support requests. Next on the top list is the question for whether or not shipping Mozilla with a set of modifications is ok. Next is an internal question, namely: Can I use this code?

Trademarks and OSS - FOSDEM 02

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:38:43 +0100

Trademarks and OSS - FOSDEM 02 # So the first talk I went to ended up being in the legal dev room on trademarks in open source projects. The speaker had a background mainly in US American trademark law and quite some background when it comes to open source licenses. To start Pamela first showed a graphic detailing the various types of trademarks: In the pool of generic names there is a large group of trademarks that are in use but not registered.

FOSDEM 2013 - 01

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:38:24 +0100

FOSDEM 2013 - 01 # On Friday morning our train left for this year’s FOSDEM. Though a bit longish I have a strong preference for going by train as this gives more time and opportunity for hacking (in my case trying out Elastic Search), reading (in my case the book “Team Geek”) and chatting with other FOSDEM visitors. Monday morning was mostly busy with meeting people - at the FSFE, Debian, Apache Open Office booths, generally in the hallways.

Elastic Search meetup Berlin – January 2013

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:34:17 +0100

Elastic Search meetup Berlin – January 2013 # The first meetup this year I went to started with a large bag of good news for Elastic Search users. In the offices of Sys Eleven (thanks for hosting) the meetup started at 7p.m. last Tuesday. Simon Willnauer gave an overview of what to expect of the upcoming major release of Elastic Search: For all 0.20.x version ES features a shard allocator version that is ignorant of which index shards belong to, machine properties, usage patterns.

Linux vs. Hadoop - some inspiration?

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:22:14 +0100

Linux vs. Hadoop - some inspiration? # This (even for my blog’s standards) long-ish blog post was inspired by a talk given late last year at Apache Con EU as well as from discussions around what constitutes “Apache Hadoop compatibility” and how to make extending Hadoop easier. The post is based on conversations with at least one guy close to the Linux kernel community and another developer working on Hadoop.

ABC - die Katze lief im Schnee

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:42:47 +0100

ABC - die Katze lief im Schnee # Seen this morning in Berlin: A little impression from what the city looked like the weeks before it turned green on Christmas: For winter images of other years see also previous posts. Title taken from a children’s song:

On Taming Text

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 20:21:19 +0100

On Taming Text # This time of the year I would usually post pictures of my bicycle standing in the snow somewhere in Tierpark. This year however I was tricked into using public transport instead: a) After my husband found a new job, we now share some of the route to work - and he isn’t crazy going by bike when it’s snowing. b) I got myself a Nexus7 earlier this month which obsoleted having to take paper books with me when using public transport.

Thanks for all the help

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:24:44 +0100

Thanks for all the help # 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).

RecSys Stammtisch Berlin - December 2012

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:40:20 +0100

RecSys Stammtisch Berlin - December 2012 # Earlier this month I attended the fourth Recommender Stammtisch in Berlin. The event was kindly hosted by Soundcloud - who on top of organising the speakers provided a really yummy buffet by Kochzeichen D. With Paul Lamere the evening started with a very entertaining but also very packed talk on why music recommendation is special - or put more generally why all recommender systems are special:

Elastic Search meetup Berlin

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:39:01 +0100

Elastic Search meetup Berlin # Today Retresco hosted the (to my knowledge fourth) Elastic Search User Group Berlin - a group dedicated to using Lucene as part of Elastic Search. With roughly fifteen attendees the meetup attracted a decent crowd - most interestingly many of the people there were already using the software either in production or for closed beta projects. The fist talk given was by people from ferret-go - a company doing media monitoring for brands focused on the German market.

ApacheConEU - part 11 (last part)

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:35:21 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 11 (last part) # One of the last sessions covered logging frameworks for Java. Christian Grobmeier started by detailing the common requirements for all logging frameworks: Speed - developers do not want to pay a disproportional penalty for using a logging framework. Fail-safety and reliability - under no circumstances should your logging framework kill your application. In addition it would be most annoying to find that one log message that would help you de-cypher the problem your application ran into missing.

ApacheConEU - part 10

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:34:15 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 10 # In the next session Jukka introduced Tika - a toolkit for parsing content from files including a heuristics based component for guessing the file type: Based on file extension, magic and certain patterns in the file the file type can be guessed rather reliably. Some anecdotes: not all mime types are registered with IANA, there are of course conflicting file extensions, Microsoft Word not only localises their interface but also the magic in the file,

ApacheCon EU - part 09

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 20:54:29 +0100

ApacheCon EU - part 09 # In the Solr track Elastic Search and Solr Cloud went into competition. The comparison itself was slightly apples-and-oranges like as the speaker compared the current ES version based on Lucene 3.x and Solr Cloud based on Lucene 4.0. During the comparison it still turned out that both solutions are more or less comparable - so choice again depends on your application. However I did like the conclusion: The speaker did not pick a clear winner in terms of projects.

ApacheConEU - part 08

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 20:53:23 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 08 # Jan Lehnardt’s talk covered the history of CouchDB - including lessons learnt along the way. The first issue he went into: Shipping 1.0 is hard! They spent a lot of effort and time in order to have a stable database that won’t loose your data - only to have a poorly patch slip in for 1.0 that resulted in data loss. The fury of action happening afterwards was truely amazing - people working on rolling shifts all over the planet to not only fix the issue but also provide recovery tooling for those affected by the bug.

ApacheConEU - part 07

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:51:08 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 07 # Julien Nioche shared some details on the nutch crawler. Being the mother of all Hadoop projects (as in Hadoop was born out of developments inside of nutch) the project has become rather quite with a steady stream of development in the recent past. Julien himself uses the nutch for gathering crawled data for several customer projects - feeding this data into an NLP pipeline based on Behemoth that glues Mahout, UIMA and Gate together.

ApacheConEU - part 06

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:48:35 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 06 # For the next session I joined the Tomcat crowd in Marc Thomas’ to learn more on Tomcat reverse proxy configurations. One rather common setup is to have Tomcat connected to an httpd instance. One common issue encountered with this setup in particular when running httpd with the event mpm is the problem of thread exhaustion on tomcat’s side. Fixes include always having more active tomcat threads than there can be httpd threads at any one time and to disable persistent connections.

ApacheConEU - part 05

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 20:47:22 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 05 # The afternoon featured several talks on HBase - both it’s implementation as well as schema optimisation. One major issue in schema design in the choice of key. Simplest recommendation is to make sure that keys are designed such that on reading data load will be evenly distributed accross all nodes to prevent region-server hot-spotting. General advise here are hashing or reversing urls. When it comes to running your own HBase cluster make sure you know what is going on in the cluster at any point in time:

ApacheConEU - part 04

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:46:01 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 04 # The second talk I went to was the one on the dev@hadoop.a.o insights given by Steve Loughran. According to Steve Hadoop has turned into what he calls an operating system for the data center - similar to Linux in that it’s development is not driven by a vendor but by its users: Even though Hortenworks, Cloudera and MapR each have full time people working on Hadoop (and related projects), this work usually is driven by customer requirements which ultimately means that someone is running a Hadoop cluster that he has trouble with and wants to have fixed.

ApacheConEU - part 03

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 20:27:11 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 03 # Tuesday started early with a plenary - run by the sponsor, not too many news there, except for the very last slide that raised a question that is being discussed often also within the ASF - namely how to define oneself compared to non-ASF projects. What is the real benefit for our users - and what is the benefit for people to go with the ASF.

ApacheCon EU - part 02

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:26:25 +0100

ApacheCon EU - part 02 # For me the week started with the Monday Hackathon. Even though I was there early the room quickly filled up and was packed at lunch time. I really liked the idea of having people interested in a topic register in advance - it gave the organisers a chance to assign tables to topics and put signs on the tables to advertise the topic worked on.

ApacheConEU - part 01

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 14:30:57 +0100

ApacheConEU - part 01 # Apache Con EU in Germany - in November, in Sinsheim (in the middle of nowhere): I have to admit that I was more than skeptical whether that would actually work out very well. A day after the closing session it’s clear that the event was a huge success: Days before all tickets were sold out, there were six sessions packed with great talks on all things related to Apache Software Foundation projects - httpd, tomcat, lucene, open office, hadoop, apache commons, james, felix, cloud stack and tons of other projects were well covered.

Teddy in London

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:04:44 +0100

Teddy in London # While I was at the conference – Teddy spent some time exploring the surroundings of the conference hotel. Looks like in particular Hyde park was attractive:

Strata EU - part 4

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 20:17:36 +0100

Strata EU - part 4 # The rest of the day was mainly reserved for more technical talks: Tom Wight introducing the merits of MR2, also known as YARN. Steve Loughran gave a very insightful talk on the various failure modes of Hadoop – though the Namenode is like the most obvious single point of failure there are a few more traps waiting for those depending on their Hadoop clusters: Hadoop does just find with single harddisks failing.

Strata EU - part 3

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 20:16:29 +0200

Strata EU - part 3 # The first Tuesday morning keynote put the hype around big data into historical context: According to wikipedia big data apps are defined by their capability of coping with data set sizes that are larger than can be handled with commonly available machines and algorithms. Going from that definition we can look back to history and will realize that the issue of big data actually isn’t that new: Even back in the 1950s people had to deal with big data problems.

Strata EU - part 2

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:15:22 +0200

Strata EU - part 2 # The second keynote touched upon the topic of data literacy: In an age in which growing amounts of data are being generated being able to make sense of these becomes a crucial skill for citizens just like reading, writing and computing. The speaker’s message was two-fold: a) People currently are not being taught how to deal with that data but are being taught that all that growing data is evil.

O'Reilly Strata London - part 1

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:13:39 +0200

O’Reilly Strata London - part 1 # A few weeks ago I attended O’Reilly Strata EU. As I had the honour of being on the program committee I remember how hard it was to decide on which talks to accept and which ones to decline. It’s great to see that potential turned into an awesome conference on all things Big Data. I arrived a bit late as I flew in only Monday morning.

Teddy in Down Under

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:24:23 +0200

Teddy in Down Under # The last two September weeks Teddy was in Down Under. He spent the first few days exploring Sydney: Taking the ferry from Manly to the city each morning, followed by beautiful sunny weather, warm enough to already go swimming. The following days took him to the Blue Mountains and into Kangaroo Valley for some hiking, animal watching and kayaking: Of course Teddy also made some new friends:

Fourth #Recsys Stammtisch Berlin

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:38:55 +0200

Fourth #Recsys Stammtisch Berlin # This evening the 4th #recsys Stammtisch (German for “a meetup involving beer”) was kindly organised by Alan Said, Zeno Gantner and Till Plumbaum. The event was hosted by Aklamio with beers and drinks provided by Plista. They had three talks: @AlanSaid gave an overview of the topics covered in this year’s RecSys conference in Dublin. Instead of going into too much technical detail the presentation gave a whirl-wind tour of the topics that are currently under discussion, the competitions to participate in and links to people relevant to the topic to follow up with.

Teddy in Meißen

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:19:07 +0200

Teddy in Meißen # Taken earlier this year in Meißen the picture shows a detail of the beautiful cathedral: Teddy after a busy day:

Note to self: Basic R operations

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:55:53 +0200

Note to self: Basic R operations # After searching for that all too often and for too long (in particular the “add a column as index” bit): To read a file: d <- read.table(’/home/isabel/input’, sep=’,’, header=T, quote=’’) Useful for getting an overview of the data:summary(d); head(d); tail(d) For sorting some data frame: s <- d[order(d[,2]),]; For adding a column to a data frame: s$idx <- seq(0, nrow(s) - 1, 1)

Note to self - link to 3D maps

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:39:15 +0200

Note to self - link to 3D maps # After searching for the link the third time today - just in case I happen to be again looking for Nokia’s 3d maps: http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html is the non-plugin link that works in Firefox.

Some thoughts on a conf taxonomy

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 12:53:40 +0200

Some thoughts on a conf taxonomy # One common way for open source developers to meet face-to-face is to attend conferences relevant to their subject of interest. A common way to have one near you if there ain’t none yet is to go and organise one yourself. The most obvious stuff to resolve for that task: Most likely there will be some financial transactions involved - sponsors wanting to support you, attendees paying for their tickets, you paying for the venue and for food.

Speaking at ApacheCon EU 2012

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 12:47:32 +0200

Speaking at ApacheCon EU 2012 # I’ll be at ApacheCon EU in November. Looking forward to an interesting conference on all things Apache that is finally returning back to Europe. Go there if you want to learn more on Tomcat, Hadoop, httpd, HBase, Camel, Open Office, Mahout, Lucene and more. Now on to prepare the two talks I submitted: “Choosing the right tool for your data analysis task - Apache Mahout in context”

Learning German

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 08:07:09 +0200

Learning German # For some reason I got that question multiple times now from people that moved to Germany but work in companies where English is the language to use for communication - how to best learn German (in addition finding people to talk to). When thinking about how I got started with English there were a few things that helped: As a child I got some “made for learning English” crime stories to read.

Moving to a new domain

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:30:46 +0200

Moving to a new domain # Executive summary: This is to warn those of you who are subscribed to this blog - the domain to reach this blog w/o redirects will soon change to by isabel-drost-fromm.de - you might want to adjust your rss subscription accordingly. Longer version: This blog post is scheduled to go live some time after lunch-time on September 12th 2012. You might have heart rumors before - that date Ms.

Video up: Dragan Milosevic on "Robust Communication Mechanisms"

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:06:27 +0200

Video up: Dragan Milosevic on “Robust Communication Mechanisms” # Dragan Milosevic: "Robust Communication Mechanisms in zanox Reporting Systems" from David Obermann on Vimeo.

FrOSCon - on teaching

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 08:17:38 +0200

FrOSCon - on teaching # The last talk I went to during FrOSCon was Selena’s keynote on “Mistakes were made”. She started by explaining how she taught computer science (or even just computer-) concepts to teachers herself - emphasizing how exhausting teaching can be, how many even trivial concepts were unknown to her students. After that Selena briefly sketched how she herself came to IT - emphasizing how providing mostly the information she needed to accomplish the current task at hand and telling how to get more information helped her make her first steps a great deal.

FrOSCon - understanding Linux with strace

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:29:10 +0200

FrOSCon - understanding Linux with strace # Being a Java child I had only dealt with strace once before: Trying to figure out whether any part of the Mahout tests happens to use /dev/random for initialisation in a late night debugging session with my favourite embedded Linux developer. Strace itself is a great tool to actually see what your program is doing in terms of system calls, giving you the option to follow on a very detailed level what is going on.

FrOSCon - Git Goodies

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:34:14 +0200

FrOSCon - Git Goodies # In his talk on Git Goodies Sebastian Harl introduced not only some of the lesser known git tooling but also gave a brief introduction as to how git organises its database. Starting with an explanation of how patches essentially are treated as blobs identified by SHA1 hashes (thus avoiding duplication not only in the local database but allover the git universe), pointed to by trees that are in turn generated and extended by commits that are in turn referenced by branches (updates on new commits) and tags (don’t update on new commits).

FrOSCon - Robust Linux embedded platform

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:05:03 +0200

FrOSCon - Robust Linux embedded platform # The second talk I went to at FrOSCon was given by Thilo Fromm on Building a robust embedded Linux platform. For more information on the underlying project see also projec HidaV on github. Slides of the talk Building a robust Linux embedded platform are already online. Inspired by a presentation on safe upgrade prodedures in embedded devices by Arnaut Vandecappelle in the Embedded Dev Room FOSDEM earlier this year Thilo extended the scope of the presentation a bit to cover safe kernel upgrades as well as package updates in embedded systems.

FrOSCon 2012 - REST

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:33:34 +0200

FrOSCon 2012 - REST # Together with Thilo I went to FrOSCon last weekend. Despite a few minor glitches and the “traditional” long BBQ line the conference was very well organised and again brought together a very diverse crowd of people including but not limited to Debian developers, OpenOffice people, FSFE representatives, KDE and Gnome developers, people with background in Lisp, Clojure, PHP, Java, C and HTML5. The first talk we went to was given by JThijssen on REST in practice.

Video: Stefan Hübner on Cascalog

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:49:39 +0200

Video: Stefan Hübner on Cascalog # Stefan Hübner: "Introducing Cascalog: Functional Data Processing for Hadoop" from David Obermann on Vimeo.

Video: "Accessing Hadoop data with HCatalog and PostgreSQL"

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:53:54 +0200

Video: “Accessing Hadoop data with HCatalog and PostgreSQL” # Manuel Meßner, Stephan Friese, Dr. Stefanie Huber: "Accessing Hadoop data with HCatalog and PostgreSQL" from David Obermann on Vimeo.

Open Source Meetup Berlin

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 20:22:33 +0200

Open Source Meetup Berlin # This evening the (to my knowledge first) Berlin Open Source Meetup took place at Prater (Bier-)garten in Berlin. There are lots of project specific meetings, a monthly Free Software meeting, quite some stuff on project management. However this was one of the rare occasions where you get Linux kernel hackers, Wikidata project members, Debian developers, security people, mobile developers as well as people writing on free software or making movies related to the topic around one table.

Spotted this morning...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:03:28 +0200

Spotted this morning… # in front of my office: Ever wondered how accurate navigable map data for your Garmin, your in-car navigation system (most likely), or maps.nokia.com are created? One piece of the puzzle is the car above collecting data for Navteq, a subsidary of Nokia.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - August 2012

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 23:30:29 +0200

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - August 2012 # Despite beautiful summer weather roughly 50 people gathered at ImmobilienScout24 for the August 2012 edition of the Apache Hadoop Get Together (Thanks again for hosting the event and sponsoring drinks and pizza to ImmoScout as well as to David Obermann for organising the meetup. Today there were three talks: In the first presentation Dragan Milosevic (also known from his talk at the Hadoop GetTogether and his presentation at Berlin Buzzwords) provided more insight as to how Zanox is managing their internal RPC protocols in particular when it comes to versioning and upgrading protocol versions.

Data Scientists - researchers' persectives

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:35:58 +0200

Data Scientists - researchers’ persectives # “Data scientist” as a term has caught quite some attention as of late (together with all the big data, scalability and cloud hype). Instead of re-hashing arguments seen in other sources I thought it might make more sense to link to a few of the thought provoking posts I came across recently. In his post Mikio Braun analyses the factors motivating research in academia vs.

On Reading Code

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:14:58 +0200

On Reading Code # “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” –Stephen King Quite a while ago GeeCon published the video taped talk of Kevlin Henney on "Cool Code". This keynote is great to watch for everyone who loves to read code - not the one you encounter in real world enterprise systems - but the one that truely teaches you lessons:

Apache Con returns to Europe

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 20:41:49 +0200

Apache Con returns to Europe # In November Apache Con will come back to Europe. The event will take place in Sinsheim inviting foundation members, project committers, contributors and users to meet, discuss and have fun during the one week event. Several meetups will be held the weekend before the main conference kicks off, watch out for announcements on your favourite project mailing list. ApacheCon is still open for submissions until August 3rd - head over to the Call for submissions for more information.

FrOSCon 2012

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:25:08 +0200

FrOSCon 2012 # On August 25th/26th the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) will again kick off in Sankt Augustin/ Germany. The event is completely community organised, hosted by the FH Sankt Augustin. It covers a broad range of free software topics like Arduino microcontrollers, git goodies, politics, strace, open nebula, wireshark and others. Three highlights that are on my schedule: I’ll make sure I do not miss Thilo Fromm’s presentation on building a platform project on top of Open Embedded.

O'Reilly Strata coming to London

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:05:56 +0200

O’Reilly Strata coming to London # O’Reilly Strata is coming to London. The first edition of Strata back in 2011 brought Big Data developers, designers, scientists and decision makers together to discuss all things scalable. This year in October the conference comes to Europe: O’Reilly Strata EU will take place in London. Date: October 1st - 2nd 2012 Venue: Hilton London Metropole, 225 Edgware Road, London W2 1JU, UK

Book: Search Patterns

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 20:41:31 +0200

Book: Search Patterns # I got the book months ago during FOSDEM - the O’Reilly book table always is a pretty dangerous place as a meeting point for me: Search Patterns - Design for Discovery is one of those small, deceivingly beautiful books that manages to explain effective search engine design by focusing on the end user needs but going into some detail concerning the basics of search engine backends as well.

Teddy in Sweden

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:22:24 +0200

Teddy in Sweden # Some picture taken all the way up in northern Sweden: Those picture were taken mid-June. That means what looks like Teddy sitting in the afternoon sun actually was taken 20min before midnight some 40km south of the arctic circle at Camp Frevisören - an incredible spot to start the day on a canoo: View Larger Map (That little half-isle that stretches into the ocean.) If you ever travel that far north, make sure to stop by at Hulkoff.

Recsys meetup Berlin

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 01:31:47 +0200

Recsys meetup Berlin # Planning a meetup in Berlin: 8 people register, a table for 14 people is booked, 16+ people arrive - all of that even if no pre-defined topic or talk is announced. Seems like building recommender systems is a hot topic currently in Berlin. Thanks to Zeno Gantner from MyMedialight for organising the event - looking forward to the next edition.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 20:41:18 +0200

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # As seen on Xing - the next Apache Hadoop Get Together is planned to take place in August: When: 15. August, 18 p.m. Where: Immobilien Scout GmbH, Andreasstr. 10, 10243 Berlin As always there will be slots of 30min each for talks on your Hadoop topic. After each talk there will be time for discussion. It is important to indicate attendance. Only registered visitors will be permitted to attend.

Need your input: Failing big data projects - experiences from the wild

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:11:30 +0200

Need your input: Failing big data projects - experiences from the wild # A few weeks ago my talk on “How to fail your big data project quick and rapidly” was accepted at O’Reily Strata conference in London. The basic intention of this talk is to share some anti-patterns, embarrassing failure modes and “please don’t do this at home” kind of advice with those entering the buzzwordy space of big data.

Note to self: Clojure with Vim and Maven

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 20:07:55 +0200

Note to self: Clojure with Vim and Maven # Steps to get a somewhat working Clojure environment with vim: Install the current vimclojure plugin. Get and install a nailgun client. Add vimclojure to your clojure project pom.xml. Start the nailgun server from within your maven project with mvn clojure:nailgun with the maven clojure plugin. Finally start vim, open your favourite clojure file - you can open a REPL with \sr, when in a function definition you can evaluate that with \et - see also tamining vim clojure

Apache Sling and Jackrabbit event coming to Berlin

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:59:28 +0200

Apache Sling and Jackrabbit event coming to Berlin # Interested in Apache Sling and/or Apache Jackrabbit? Then you might be interested in hearing that on September 26th to 28th there will be an event in town on these two topics - mainly organised by Adobe, but labeled as community event, meaning that there will be a number of active community members attending the conference: adaptTo(). From their website: In late September 2012 Berlin will become the global heart beat for developers working on the Adobe CQ technical stack.

Preparation done - clock is ticking

Thu, 31 May 2012 21:24:11 +0200

Preparation done - clock is ticking # The clock is ticking - only one more weekend to go before Berlin Buzzwords opens its doors for the main conference (check out the Wiki for the Sunday evening Barcamp and the Sunday Movie Hackday). Looking forward to an amazing week with awesome speakers and great attendees. One word of warning before: Given all the buzz around that conference as of now until mid-next week I won’t take any major decisions, most likely I won’t be able to follow through with any additional organisation, probably I won’t remember everyone I meet on-site.

Last minute Getting Around information for Berlin Buzzwords

Tue, 29 May 2012 12:47:23 +0200

Last minute Getting Around information for Berlin Buzzwords # I’ve been sharing information on how to get around in Berlin more often than I’d like to type it out - putting it here for future reference. Before going to Berlin make sure to put an app on your phone that helps with finding the right public transport mix to use for going from one place to another: Nokia Public Transit for WP7 phones

Teddy in Zürich

Mon, 28 May 2012 20:20:39 +0200

Teddy in Zürich # A few beautiful sunny though windy days in Zurich late April: View from the path between Ütliberg and Adliswil/Felsenegg: Strolling through the city and sitting next to Zürichsee enjoying the sun afterwards: A boat trip to Rapperswil - started cold and cloudy, finished warm and sunny:

Teddy in Poznan

Sun, 27 May 2012 20:03:30 +0200

Teddy in Poznan # Some images taken in Poznan after GeeCon - big Thanks! to Dawid for giving advise on where to go for sightseeing, exhibitions and going-out. The tour started close to river Warta - it being a sunny day it seemed like a perfect fit to just walk through the city, starting along the river headed towards the cathedral: After that Poznan Citadel was a great place to spend lunch time - sitting somewhere green and shady:

GeeCon - Testing hell and how to fix it

Sat, 26 May 2012 08:08:20 +0200

GeeCon - Testing hell and how to fix it # The last regular talk I went to was on testing hell at Atlassian – in particular the JIRA project. What happened to JIRA might actually be known to developers who have to deal with huge legacy projects that predate the junit and dependency injection era: Over time their test base grew into a monster that was hard to maintain and didn’t help at all with making developers confident on checkin time that they would not break anything.

GeeCon - Solr at Allegro

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:07:06 +0200

GeeCon - Solr at Allegro # One particularly interesting to me was on Allegro’s (polish Ebay) Solr usage. In terms of numbers: They have 20Mio offers in Poland, another 10Mio active offers in partnering countries. In addition in their index there are 50Mio inactive offers in Poland and 40 Mio closed offers outside that country. They serve 8Mio updates a day, that is 100 updates a second. Those are related to start/end of bidding phase, buy now actions, cancelled bids, bids themselves.

GeeCon - managing remote projects

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:05:54 +0200

GeeCon - managing remote projects # In his talk on visibility in distributed teams Pawel Wrzeszcz motivated why working remotely might be benefitial for both, employees (less commute time, more family time) as well as employers (hiring world wide instead of local, getting more talent in). He then went into more detail on some best practices that worked for his company as well as for himself. When it comes to managing your energy the trick mainly is to find the right balance between isolating work from private live (by having a separate area in your home, having a daily routine with fixed start and end times) and integrating work into your daily live and loving what you do: The more boring your job is, the less likely you are going to succeed when working remotely.

GeeCon - failing software projects fast and rapidly

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:04:56 +0200

GeeCon - failing software projects fast and rapidly # My second day started with a talk on how to fail projects fast and rapidly. There are a few tricks to do that that relate to different aspects of your project. Lets take a look at each of them in turn. The first measures to take to fail a project are organisational really: Refer to developers as resources – that will demotivate them and express that they are replaceable instead of being valuable human beings.

GeeCon - TDD and it's influence on software design

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:04:00 +0200

GeeCon - TDD and it’s influence on software design # The second talk I went to on the first day was on the influence of TDD on software design. Keith Braithwaite did a really great job of first introducing the concept of cyclomatic complexity and than showing at the example of Hudson as well as many other open source Java projects that the average and mean cyclomatic complexity of all those projects actually is pretty close to one and when plotted for all methods pretty much follows a power law distribution.

GeeCon - Randomized testing

Mon, 21 May 2012 08:02:55 +0200

GeeCon - Randomized testing # I arrived late during lunch time on Thursday for GeeCon – however just in time to listen to one of the most interesting talks when it comes to testing. Did you ever have the issue of writing code that runs well in your development environment but crashes as soon as it’s rolled out at customers only to find out that their Locale setting was causing the issues?

GeeCon 2012 - part 1

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:02:54 +0200

GeeCon 2012 - part 1 # Devoxx, Java Posse, Qcon, Goto Con, an uncountable number of local Java User Groups – aren’t there enough conferences on just Java, that weird programming language that “makes developers stupid by letting them type too much boiler plate” (Keith Braithwaite)? I spent Thursday and Friday last week in Poznan at a conference called GeeCon – there main focus is on anything Java, including TDD, Agile and testability.

Presentation shortening

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:23:03 +0200

Presentation shortening # In an effort to make more room for more talks in our schedule for this year’s Berlin Buzzwords we’ve asked quite a few people to shorten their presentation from 40min down to 20min. The thought behind it is to not only give more people a chance to talk on their work but also have those shorter talks focused down to the absolute essential information for people to learn.

Traveling to Berlin in June? Update: No airport changes!

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:23:09 +0200

Traveling to Berlin in June? Update: No airport changes! # Update: Seems like there won’t be any airport changes for Berlin Buzzwords: German article at Tagesspiegel on postponing airport opening. If you are planning to travel to Berlin in June – e.g. to attend Berlin Buzzwords – note that there is a major change to airports happening on June 2nd: Saturday, June 2nd will be the last day, both Schönefeld Airport (SXF) as well as Tegel Airport (TXL) are going to be open.

Berlin Buzzwords Schedule online - book your ticket now

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:29:14 +0200

Berlin Buzzwords Schedule online - book your ticket now # As of beginning of last week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is online. The Program Committee has completed reviewing all submissions and set up the schedule containing a great lineup of speakers for this years Berlin Buzzwords program. Among the speakers we have Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat), Alex Lloyd (Google), Michael Busch (Twitter) as well as Nicolas Spiegelberg (Facebook). Checkout our program in the online schedule.

Berlin Hadoop Get Together (April 2012)- videos are up

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:22:05 +0200

Berlin Hadoop Get Together (April 2012)- videos are up # Sebastian Schelter: Introducing Apache Giraph for Large Scale Graph Processing Dr. Falk-Florian Henrich: Applying Compiler Technology to Event Stream Processing Dr. Mikio Braun: TWIMPACT: On Real-Time Twitter Analysis

Second steps with git

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:34:46 +0200

Second steps with git # Leaving this here in case I’ll search for it later again - and I’m pretty sure I will. The following is a simplification of the git workflow detailed earlier - in particular the first two steps and a little background. When dealing with remotes the git remote documentation is very useful. When sharing your changes with others the git tutorial on sharing changes is very helpful.

Music in Berlin early June

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:20:59 +0200

Music in Berlin early June # A little bit of inspiration on what to do the weekend before and after Buzzwords in Berlin: Ballet in June at the Staatsballett Berlin Concerts in June at <a href=“ http://www.konzerthaus.de/programm/?datetimeAnf=1338501600&datetimeEnd=1341093600&id_language=1&month=6&year=2012" Konzerthaus Berlin Opera in June at Staatsoper Berlin Opera in June at Deutsche Oper Berlin Concerts in June at the Philharmoniker Berlin Opera in June at Komische Oper Berlin Theater (German-only, sorry, but open-air) at Hexenkessel Hoftheater

Berlin Buzzwords scheduling - behind the scenes

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:23:39 +0200

Berlin Buzzwords scheduling - behind the scenes # Since roughly a week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is available online. Tickets are still available at the regular rate - make sure to book your ticket now - you’ve got another three weeks to purchase tickets at the regular rate, last minute rate will up the prize by another 100 Euros starting May 20th. I thought it might be interesting to share some background on how Berlin Buzzwords scheduling worked out this year.

Clojure Berlin - March 2012

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:37:03 +0100

Clojure Berlin - March 2012 # In today’s Clojure meetup Stefan Hübner gave an introduction to Cascalog - a Clojure library based on Cascading for large scale data processing on Apache Hadoop without hassle. After a brief overview of what he is using the tool for to do log processing at his day job for http://maps.nokia.com Stefan went into some more detail on why he chose Cascalog over other project that provide abstraction layers on top of Hadoop’s plain map/reduce library: Both Pig and Hive provide easy to learn SQL-like languages to quickly write analysis jobs.

Visiting Berlin Buzzwords - where to go for drinks and food

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:39:50 +0100

Visiting Berlin Buzzwords - where to go for drinks and food # There are literally hundreds of bars and restaurants in easy walking distance to the conference venue. And if that is now enough for you, hop on U-Bahn and head east to either Kreuzberg or Friedrichshain to find more. For inspiration check out Tip Berlin - they have a decent, reliable restaurant list. For quick orientation: Berlin is no one city center but many districts that all have their own look and feel to them.

Walking through Berlin

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:27:07 +0100

Walking through Berlin # Ever made the mistake of booking a flight to a city and trying to decide on what to do only after you arrived? That type of planning does work for Berlin - though you may end up with quite a different schedule than originally intended. The only thing that needs a bit of planning ahead (about a month) is visiting the Bundestag - fast way to discover it is to just go up to it’s dome.

Berlin Hadoop Get Together - videos are up

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 20:08:36 +0100

Berlin Hadoop Get Together - videos are up # Markus Andrezak on Queue management with Kanban: Queue Management in Product Development with Kanban - enabling flow and fast feedback along the value chain from David Obermann on Vimeo. Martin Scholl on Storm: On Firehoses and Storms: Event Thinking, Event Processing from David Obermann on Vimeo. Fabian Hüske on Stratosphere: Large-Scale Data Analysis Beyond Map/Reduce from David Obermann on Vimeo.

Apache Hadoop Get Together - February 2012

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:14:42 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together - February 2012 # Today the first Hadoop Get Together Berlin 2012 took place - David got the event hosted by and at Axel Springer who kindly also paid for the (soon to be published) videos. Thanks also to the unbelievable Machine company for the tasty buffet after the meetup. Another thanks to Open Source Press for donating three of their Hadoop books. Today’s selection was quite diverse: The event started with a presentation by Markus Andrezak who gave an overview of Kanban and how it helped him change the development workflow over at eBay/mobile.

HowTo: Meetups in Berlin

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:23:32 +0100

HowTo: Meetups in Berlin # I get that question once in a while - and need the list below myself every now and then: How to actually setup a meetup in Germany. Essentially it all boils down to three questions: Which channels to use for PR? Where to do the meeting? What other benefits to offer to attendees? When it comes to PR there are several options: Announce the meetup on relevant mailing lists

Happy Valentine

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:24:33 +0100

Happy Valentine # Free Software developers can be very critical: Every single line of code gets scrutinized, every design is reviewed by several often opinionated people. Even the way communities are supposed to work sometimes gets restricted. Sometimes a simple Thank You can make all the difference for any contributor or committer. FSFE proposed a really nice campaign: Celebrate the “I love Free Software” - Day on February 14th. In the hope that some of the readers of this blog actively develop or contribute to free software projects - this is a thank you for you!

February 14th: "I love free software day"

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:07:00 +0100

February 14th: “I love free software day” # This year FSFE is once again running their I love free software campaign on February 14th: The goal they put up is to have more love reports, hugs and Thank You messages sent out than bug reports filed against projects. They have put online a few ideas on what to do that day. I’d like to add one additional option: If you are using any free software and you feel the urgent need to file a bug report on that day, use the opportunity to submit a patch as well: Make sure to not only describe what is going wrong but add a patch that contains a test to show the issue and a code modification that fixes the issue, is compatible with the project’s coding guidelines, doesn’t break anything else in the project.

Note to self - Java heap analysis

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:30:21 +0100

Note to self - Java heap analysis # As I keep searching for those URLs over and over again linking them here. When running into JVM heap issues (an out of memory exception is a pretty sure sign, so can be the program getting slower and slower over time) there’s a few things you can do for analysis: Start with telling the effected JVM process to output some statistics on heap layout as well as thread state by sending it a SIGQUIT (if you want to use the number instead - it’s 3 - avoid typing 9 instead ;) ).

Apache Mahout 0.6 released

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:33:37 +0100

Apache Mahout 0.6 released # As of Monday, February 6th a new Apache Mahout version was released. The new package features Lots of performance improvments: A new LDA implementation using Collapsed Variational Bayes 0th Derivative Approximation - try that out if you have been bothered by the way less than optimal performance of the old version. Improved Decision Tree performance and added support for regression problems Reduced runtime of dot product between vectors - many algorithms in Mahout rely on that, so these performance improvements will affect anyone using them.

Clojure in Berlin

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:01:53 +0100

Clojure in Berlin # Though I had the chance to tinker with some Clojure code only briefly it’s programming model and the resulting compact programs do fascinate me. As the resulting code runs on a JVM and does integrate well with existing Java libraries migration is comparably cheap and easy. Today I finally managed to attend the local Berlin Clojure meetup, co-organised by Stefan Hübner and Fronx. Timing couldn’t have been much better: In this evenings event Philip Potter from Thoughtworks introduced Overtone - a library for making music with Clojure.

February 2012 Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:34:25 +0100

February 2012 Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # The upcoming Apache Hadoop Get-Together is scheduled for 22. February, 6 p.m. - taking place at Axel Springer, Axel-Springer-Str. 65, 10888 Berlin. Thanks to Springer for sponsoring the location! Note: It is important to indicate attendance. Due to security restrictions at the venue only registered visitors will be permitted. Get your ticket here: https://www.xing.com/events/hadoop-22-02-859807 Talks scheduled thus far: Markus Andrezak : “Queue Management in Product Development with Kanban - enabling flow and fast feedback along the value chain” - It’s a truism today that fast feedback from your market is a key advantage.

Dorkbot Berlin

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:18:46 +0100

Dorkbot Berlin # c-base - 8p.m. on a Monday evening - the room is packed (and pretty cloudy as well): Time for Dorkbot, a short series of talks on “People doing strange things with electricity” hosted by Frank Rieger. First talk up on stage was Gismo on Raumfahrtagentur - a Berlin maker-space located in Wedding. Originating from the presenter’s interest in electrical bikes a group of ten people interested in hardware hacking got together.

Scrumtisch Berlin

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:10:35 +0100

Scrumtisch Berlin # After quite some time off I went to the Scrumtisch Berlin. The event was incredibly well visited - roughly 50 people filled the upper floor at Cafe Hundertwasser. Today’s event was organised such that participants first collected discussion topics, prioritised them together and then discussed the top three items in a timebox of 15 minutes each. Topics collected were: Best tricks to make teams self organised (20 votes)

Teddy in Chicago

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:56:07 +0100

Teddy in Chicago # Last week I spent several days in Chicago mainly to attend a few meetings at the local Nokia/Navteq office. Though the schedule was pretty packed, a few hours remained to explore the then frosty and windy city: Top three images: Some impressions of the city. Bottom left: Teddy’s new friend. Bottom right: Situation at ORD when flying out - fortunately both, the airport as well as the airline (Swiss) have quite some experience with challenging weather conditions so that we could leave without too much delay.

Scrum done wrong

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:39:11 +0100

Scrum done wrong # “Agile and Lean have a single purpose: to continually challenge the status quo. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably an impediment to it.” agile42.com Judging from the way some people become overly careful when discussing agile in general and Scrum in particular in my presence I seem to slowly have built up a reputation for being a strong proponent of these methods. Given the large number of flaky implementations as well as misunderstandings it seems to have become fashionable to blame Scrum for all badness and dismiss it altogether - up to the point where developers are proud to finally having abandoned Scrum completely - so that now they can work in iterations, accept new tasks only for upcoming but not for the current iteration, develop in a test-driven way, have daily sync meetings, mark tasks done only when they are delivered to and accepted by the customer, have regular “how to improve our work” meetings, estimate tasks in story points and only plan for as much work per iteration as was done in the past iteration

Reasons for you to visit Berlin Buzzwords

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:59:00 +0100

Reasons for you to visit Berlin Buzzwords # 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.

Berlin Buzzwords 2012 - Call for submissions

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:15:11 +0100

Berlin Buzzwords 2012 - Call for submissions # 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: 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.

One day later

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:57:25 +0100

One day later #

Fun little new toy

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:48:21 +0100

Fun little new toy # Yesterday Thilo invited me to attend an “Electronics 101” workshop including an introduction to soldering that was scheduled to start at 7p.m. this evening at the offices of IN-Berlin e.V.. As part of my studies back in university I do have a little bit of background in Electronics, but never before had tried any serious soldering (apart from fixing one of our audio cables) so I thought, why not.

Talking people into submitting patches - results

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:42:16 +0100

Talking people into submitting patches - results # Back in November I gave a talk at Apache Con NA in Vancouver on talking friends and colleagues into contributing patches to open source projects. The intended audience for this talk were experienced committers to Apache projects, the goal was to learn more on their tricks for talking people into patching. First of all thanks for an interesting discussion on the topic - it was great to get into the room with barely enough slides to fill 10 min and still have a lively discussion 45min later.

#28c3

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:07:28 +0100

#28c3 # Restate my assumptions. One: Mathematics is the language of nature. Two: Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. The above is a quote from today's "Hackers in movies" talk at 28c3 - which amongst others also showed a brief snippet of the movie Pi. For several years I stayed well away from that one famous Hackers' conference in Berlin that takes place annually between Christmas and New Year.

Learning Machine Learning with Apache Mahout

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:20:12 +0100

Learning Machine Learning with Apache Mahout # Once in a while I get questions like Where to start learning more on machine learning. Other than the official sources I think there is quite good coverage also in the Mahout community: Since it was founded several presentations have been given that give an overview of Apache Mahout, introduce special features or even go into more details on particular implementations. Below is an attempt to create a collection of talks given so far without any claim to contain links to all videos or lectures.

Berlin Tech Meetups

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:32:57 +0100

Berlin Tech Meetups # 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 Hadoop Get Together Berlin DevOps Berlin Buzzwords (conference, no meetup) Berlin Scrumtisch Java User Group Berlin/Brandenburg Berlin Google Technology User Group

Video up: Douwe Osinga

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:01:29 +0100

Video up: Douwe Osinga # Douwe Osinga: Overview of the Data Processing Pipeline at Triposo from David Obermann on Vimeo.

Video: Max Jacob on Pig for NLP

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:26:26 +0100

Video: Max Jacob on Pig for NLP # Max Jacob: Pig for Natural Language Processing from Isabel Drost on Vimeo.

Slides online

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:55:36 +0100

Slides online # Slides of this week’s Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin are online at: Douwe Osinga: Overview of the Data Processing Pipeline at Triposo Max Jacob: Pig for Natural Language Processing Overall a great event, well organised - looking forward to seeing you at the next Get Together. If you want to get in touch with our participants, learn about new events or simply chat between meetups join our Apache Hadoop Get Together Linked.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin December 2011

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:50:26 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin December 2011 # First of all a huge Thank You to David Obermann for organising today’s Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin: After a successful Berlin Buzzwords and a rather long pause following that finally a Christmas meetup took place today at Smarthouse, kindly sponsored by Axel Springer and organised by David Obermann from idealo. About 40 guests from Neofonie, Nokia, Amen, StudiVZ, Gameduell, TU Berlin, nurago, Soundcloud, nugg.

December Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:14:10 +0100

December Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # 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.

Apache Con Wrap Up

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:45:56 +0100

Apache Con Wrap Up # First things first - slides, audio and abstracts of Apache Con are all online now on their Lanyrd page. So if you missed the conference or could not attend a session due to conflicting with another interesting session - that’s your chance to catch up. For those of you who are speaking German, there’s also a summary of Apache Con available on heise Open. (If you don’t speak German, I have been told that the Google Translate version of the site captures the gist of the article reasonably well.

Cloudera in Berlin

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:24:54 +0100

Cloudera in Berlin # Cloudera is hosting another round of trainings in Berlin in November this year. In addition to the trainings on Apache Hadoop this time around there will also be trainings on Apache HBase. Register online via: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2315126606 http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2349094204

Being in San Francisco

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:47:08 +0100

Being in San Francisco # I spent the last two weeks together with Thilo in San Francisco - and neighboring areas. I had asked beforehand for recommendations on where to go and what to do, had purchased a “Rough Guide to California” as well as a “Lonely Planet guide for San Francisco”. In addition I shared my arrival and departure times with a few people I know here. As to be expected our schedule quickly grew until it exploded, so we ended up doing greedy optimisation stuffing things in and putting them out again while we went along.

Apache Hadoop Get Together - Hand over

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:20:44 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together - Hand over # 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.

One Ring to rule them all

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:23:15 +0200

One Ring to rule them all # One Ring to find them One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them:

Apache Con NA

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:50:23 +0200

Apache Con NA # Title: Apache Con NA Location: Vancouver Link out: Click here Start Date: 2011-11-07 End Date: 2011-11-11

See you in Vancouver at Apache Con NA 2011

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:49:11 +0200

See you in Vancouver at Apache Con NA 2011 # Mid November Apache hosts its famous yearly conference - this time in Vancouver/Canada. They kindly accepted my presentations on Apache Mahout for intelligent data analysis (mostly focused on introducing the project to new comers and showing what happened within the project in the past year - if you have any wish concerning topics you would like to see covered in particular, please let me know) as well as a more committer focused one on Talking people into creating patches (with the goal of highlighting some of the issues new-comers to free software projects that want to contribute run into and initiating a discussion on what helps to convince them to keep up the momentum and over come and obstacles).

GoTo Con AMS - Day 2

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:47:14 +0200

GoTo Con AMS - Day 2 # Day two of GoTo Con Amsterdam started with a keynote by former Squeak developer Dan Ingalls. He introduced the Lively kernel - a component architecture for HTML5 that runs in any browser and allows easy composition, sharing and programming of items. Having seen Squeak years ago and being thrilled by its concepts even back then it was amazing to see what you can do with Lively kernel in a browser.

GoTo Con AMS - Day 1

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:44:03 +0200

GoTo Con AMS - Day 1 # Last week GoTo Con took place in Amsterdam. Being a sister conference to GoTo in Aarhus the Amsterdam event focused on the broad topics of agile development, architectural challenges, backend and frontend development, platforms like the JVM and .NET. In addition the Amsterdam event featured a special Apache track tailored towards presentations focusing on the development model at Apache and the technologies developed at Apache.

Dear lazy web: Travel recommendations

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:21:05 +0200

Dear lazy web: Travel recommendations # Finally getting to spend some days of vacation in the bay area soon - so I thought I might try to leverage the lazy web on recommendations on what not to miss while there. So far on our list: Rent a canoo in Sausalito Take a tour to Alcatras Get to drive down along the coast towards Half Moon Bay Spend one or two days strolling through the city to take photos

Night Trains

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:40:21 +0200

Night Trains # It was several years ago that a frequent traveller told me about it being more comfortable and time saving to travel mid-sized distances (e.g. from Berlin to Amsterdam) by train - night train that is - instead of flying. Back then without decent knowledge of which combination of booking early and discount card make prizes of trips by train somewhat comparable to those offered by airlines that wasn’t really an option for me.

GoTo Con

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:49:38 +0200

GoTo Con # Location: Amsterdam Link out: Click here Start Date: 2011-10-12 End Date: 2011-10-14 This week late Tuesday night I am going to leave for GoTo con in Amsterdam. Train tickets are already booked - this is going to be my first trip with City Night line, will see how great they are. GoTo Amsterdam features a special Apache track as well as several talk on scaling up, searching, but also includes stuff in general architectural decisions.

Design Thinking @ Scrumtisch Berlin

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:38:14 +0200

Design Thinking @ Scrumtisch Berlin # This evening Mary Poppendieck gave a presentation on Design Thinking in Berlin. “What does the US Military have in common with Apple?” In her talk Mary went into more detail about how increasing complexity calls for a need to rethink design. Slides are available online. Thanks for sharing them. Mary started with a question for the audience on who in your company decides what is to be developed: Is it the PO?

Talking people into submitting patches

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:22:34 +0200

Talking people into submitting patches # In November I am going to attend Apache Con NA. This year I decided to do a little experiment: I sumitted a talk on talking people into contributing to free software projects. The format of the talk is a bit unusual: Drawing from my - admittedly limited and very biased - experience explaining free software to others and talking people into contributing patches this talks tries to initiate a discussion on methods to get awesome developers to consider contributing their work back to free software projects.

Machine learning problem settings

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 07:10:15 +0200

Machine learning problem settings # Together with Sebastian Schelter I held a Nokia sponsored (Thank you!) lecture on large scale data analysis and data mining during the past few months. After supervising a few successful university projects based on Apache Mahout the goal of this lecture was to introduce students to some of the basic concepts and problems encountered today in a world where huge datasets are generally available and are easy to process with Apache Hadoop.

Apache Mahout Hackathon Berlin

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:39:49 +0100

Apache Mahout Hackathon Berlin # Last year Sebastian Schelter from Berlin was added to the list of committers for Apache Mahout. With two committers in town the idea was born to meet some day, work on Mahout. So why not just announce that meeting publicly and invite others who might be interested in learning more about the framework? I got in touch with c-base - a hacker space in Berlin well suited to host a Hackathon - and quickly got their ok for the event.

Apache Dinner Berlin

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 06:06:35 +0100

Apache Dinner Berlin # 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.

Note to self: svn:ignore usage

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:47:54 +0100

Note to self: svn:ignore usage # Putting the information here to make retrieving it a bit easier next time. When working with svn and some random IDE I’d really love to avoid checking in any files that are IDE specific (project configuration, classpath, etc.). The command to do that: svn propedit svn:ignore $directory_to_edit After issuing this command you’ll be prompted to enter file patterns for files to ignore or the directory names.

Berlin Scrumtisch - February 2011

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:33:06 +0100

Berlin Scrumtisch - February 2011 # The February Scrumtisch Berlin featured a talk by Lyssa Adkins, famously known for her publications on Coaching Agile teams. A mixture of fifty developers, scrum masters, coaches and product owner as well as one project manager followed Marion Eikmann’s invitation. Thanks for organising the event, as well as thank you to Hypoport for providing the venue. In her one-hour presentation she mainly focussed on two core topics: On the roles agile coaches have to fullfill as well as on the skill set needed by agile coaches.

Video is up: Paolo Negri on scaling by one order of magnitude

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:23:17 +0100

Video is up: Paolo Negri on scaling by one order of magnitude #

Video is up - Simon Willnauer on Lucene 4 Performance improvements

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:21:18 +0100

Video is up - Simon Willnauer on Lucene 4 Performance improvements #

Video is up - Josh Devins on Apache Hadoop at Nokia

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:19:55 +0100

Video is up - Josh Devins on Apache Hadoop at Nokia #

Call for Presentations Berlin Buzzwords - one more week to go

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:24:44 +0100

Call for Presentations Berlin Buzzwords - one more week to go # 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.

Teddy in Amsterdam

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:16:27 +0100

Teddy in Amsterdam # On his trip from SFO back to Europe teddy spent a few days in Amsterdam. He brought back the following pictures of bikes, cheese and the canals: Going to Amsterdam usually is pretty darn dangerous: I tend to return with some toys added to my collection of puzzles. Somehow I tend to be drawn to the shop called Gamekeeper selling them even when I do not remember the exact address or even just the street name:

Apache Mahout Meetup Amsterdam

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:18:06 +0100

Apache Mahout Meetup Amsterdam # Last week I was honoured to be invited as one of the two speakers on Apache Mahout at the Mahout meetup in Amsterdam at JTeams offices. After free beer, cola and pizza Frank Scholten gave an overview of Mahout's clustering capabilities. After a brief introduction to Mahout itself he went into a little more detail on how clustering works in general. After that with a selection of Seinfeld scripts he used a fun data set to guide the audience through the process of choosing the right data preparation steps, coming up with good training parameters and finally evaluating clustering quality.

FOSDEM - Sunday - smaller bits and pieces

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:17:57 +0100

FOSDEM - Sunday - smaller bits and pieces # With WebODF the Office track featured a very interesting project that focusses on providing a means to open ODF documents in your favourite browser: Content and formatting are converted to a form that can easily be dealt with by using a combination of HTML and CSS. Advanced editing is then supported by using JavaScript. With Open Stack the following talk focussed on an open cloud stack project that was started by NASA and Rackspace as both simultanously needed support for an open source, openly designed, developed cloud stack that strives for community inclusion.

FOSDEM - HBase at Facebook Messaging

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:17:48 +0100

FOSDEM - HBase at Facebook Messaging # Nicolas Spiegelberg gave an awesome introduction not only to the architecture that powers Facebook messaging but also to the design decisions behind their use of Apache HBase as a storage backend. Disclaimer: HBase is being used for message storage, for attachements with Haystack a different backend is used. The reasons to go for HBase include its strong consistency model, support for auto failover, load balancing of shards, support for compression, atomic read-modify-write support and the inherent Map/Reduce support.

FOSDEM - Django

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:17:38 +0100

FOSDEM - Django # The languages/ cloud computing track on Sunday started with the good, the bad and the ugly of Django's architecture. Without much ado the speaker started by giving a high level overview of the general package layout of Django - unfortunately not going into too much detail on the architecture itself. What he loves about Django are the model layer abstractions that really are no ORM only - instead both relational and non-relational databases can be supported easily.

FOSDEM - Saturday

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:17:28 +0100

FOSDEM - Saturday # Day one at FOSDEM started with a very interesting and timely keynote by Eben Moglen: Starting with the example of Egypt he voted for de-centralized distributed and thus harder to take over communication systems. In terms of tooling we are already almost there. Most use cases like micro blogging, social networking and real time communications can already be implemented in a distributed, fail safe way. So instead of going for convenience it is time to think about digital independence from very few central providers.

Teddy in Brussels

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:16:40 +0100

Teddy in Brussels # Not much time here, except for a brief view of the atomium from our bed&breakfast place in Brussels and a few very beautiful churches:

O'Reilly Strata - day one afternoon lectures

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:18:04 +0100

O’Reilly Strata - day one afternoon lectures # Big data at startups - Info ChimpsAs a startup to get good people there is no other option then to grow your own: Offer the option to gain a lot of experience in return for a not so great wage. Start out with really great hires: People who have the "get shit done gene": They discover new projects, are proud to contribute to team efforts, are confident in making changes to a code base probably not known before hand.

O'Reilly Strata - Day two - keynotes

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 20:17:09 +0100

O’Reilly Strata - Day two - keynotes # Day two of Strata started with a very inspiring insight from the host itself that extended the vision discussed earlier in the tutorials: It's not at all about the tools, the current data analytics value lies in the data itself and in the conclusions and actions drawn from analysing it. Bit.ly keynoteThe first key note was presented by bit.ly - for them there are four dimensions to data analytics:

O'Reilly Strata - Tutorial data analytics

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:17:19 +0100

O’Reilly Strata - Tutorial data analytics # Acting based on dataIt comes as no surprise to hear that also in the data analytics world engineers are unwilling to share details of how their analysis works with higher management - with on the other side not much interest on learning how analytics really works. This culture leads to a sort of black art, witch craft attitude to data analytics that hinders most innovation.

Teddy in San Francisco

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:13:56 +0100

Teddy in San Francisco # Before attending O'Reilly Strata there were a few days left to adjust to the different time zone, meet up with friends and generally spend some days in the Greater San Francisco area. As was to be expected, those were way to few days. The weekend was a bit rainy, still packed with visiting China town right after the plane had landed and spending some time at .

Slides of yesterday's Apache Hadoop Get Together

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:40:18 +0100

Slides of yesterday’s Apache Hadoop Get Together # This time with little less than 24 hours delay - the usual, by some impatiently expected, summary of the Apache Hadoop Get Together. The meetup took place at Zanox’ event campus. The room was well filled with some fourty attendees from various companies, experience with Hadoop ranging from interested beginners to experienced users. Slides of all presentations: Josh Devins on Hadoop at Nokia

CFP - Berlin Buzzwords 2011 - search, score, scale

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:00:20 +0100

CFP - Berlin Buzzwords 2011 - search, score, scale # 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:

Apache Mahout in Amsterdam

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:00:54 +0100

Apache Mahout in Amsterdam # On February 7th there will be an Apache Mahout meetup in Amsterdam kindly organised by JTeam. There will be two presentations - one by myself on classification with Apache Mahout as well as a second one by Frank Scholten on clustering with Apache Mahout. Time: 18:00 Location: Frederiksplein 1, 1017XK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Looking forward to a few days in Amsterdam.

FOSDEM II 2011

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 15:46:32 +0100

FOSDEM II 2011 # It’s already sort of a nice little tradition for me to spend the first weekend in February in Brussels for FOSDEM. This year I am particulary happy that there will be a Data Analytics Dev Room at FOSDEM. A huge Thanks to @ogrisel and @nmaillot who have done most of the heavy lifting of getting the schedule in place. Looking forward to an interesting Cloud Track, to meeting Peter Hintjens who is going to give a talk on 0MQ, the DevOps presentation and lots of very interesting DevRooms.

O'Reilly Strata Conference

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 04:34:41 +0100

O’Reilly Strata Conference # Title: O’Reilly Strata Conference Location: Santa Clara Link out: Click here Description: Early next February O’Reilly is planning to put on a very interesting conference on the topic of data analysis and the business of generating value from raw digital data. I’m really glad to have received the acceptance notification for my presentation and travel sponsorship from the DICODE project. So see you in Santa Clara.

WiFi at the Apache Hadoop Get Together

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:40:39 +0100

WiFi at the Apache Hadoop Get Together # Just a brief reminder: The next Apache Hadoop Get Together is scheduled to take place on Thursday, January 27th at 6p.m. at the Zanox Event Campus at Media Spree Berlin. We have three very interesting talks, though thirty guests registered already, we still have a few free seats. Head over to the xing event page to register if you have not done so yet.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - January 2011

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:31:48 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - January 2011 # This is to announce the next Apache Hadoop Get Together sponsored by Cloudera and Zanox that will take place in the Zanox Event Campus in Berlin. When: January 27th 2011, 6p.m. Where: zanox Event Campus (Please mark the changed event location.) Größere Kartenansicht As always there will be slots of 30min each for talks on your Hadoop topic. After each talk there will be a lot time to discuss.

White Christmas

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 16:44:33 +0100

White Christmas # Christmas brought “a little surprise” to Germany last night: The result this morning: a few cm (as in about 20) of snow - that is a white christmas everyone had been looking forward to. Just one question: Where to put all that snow when digging out my car? ;) Thanks to snow clearing services streets are all white but well drivable. Other than that lots of time for enjoying the white weather.

Apache Hadoop - Trainings by Cloudera in Berlin

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:53:22 +0100

Apache Hadoop - Trainings by Cloudera in Berlin # Cloudera is offering trainings both for Administrators as well as for Developers early next year in Berlin. If your are getting started in using Apache Hadoop this might be a great option to get your developers and operations up to speed with the framework. If you are a regular of the local Apache Hadoop Get Together a discount code should have been sent to you by mail.

Devoxx – Day one – Java, Performance and Devops

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:22:06 +0100

Devoxx – Day one – Java, Performance and Devops # In his keynote Mark Reinhold provided some information on the very interesting features to be included in the Java 7 release. Generics will be easier to declare with the diamond operator. Nested try-finally constructs that are nowadays needed to safely close resources will no longer be necessary – their will be the option of implementing a Closeable interface supporting a method close() that get’s called whenever objects of that class’s type go out of scope.

Apache Mahout Hackathon Berlin

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:50:42 +0100

Apache Mahout Hackathon Berlin # 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.

Apache Mahout Podcast

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:21:05 +0100

Apache Mahout Podcast # During Apache Con ATL Michael Coté interviewed Grant Ingersoll on Apache Mahout. The interview is available online as podcast. The interview covers the goals and current use cases of the project, goes into some detail on the reasons for initially starting it. If you are wondering what Mahout is all about, what you can do with it and which direction development is heading, the interview is a great option to find out more.

Teddy in Antwerp

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:30:56 +0100

Teddy in Antwerp # When at Devoxx Teddy went to the city taking a few pictures of the Grote Markt, the Haven as well as the main train station.

Apache Lunch Devoxx

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:30:10 +0100

Apache Lunch Devoxx # On Twitter I suggested to host an Apache dinner during Devoxx. Matthias Wesendorf of Apache MyFaces was so kind to take up the discussion carrying it over to the Apache community mailing-list. It quickly turned out that there was quite some interest with several members and committers attending Devoxx. We scheduled the meetup for Friday after the conference during lunch time. I pinged a few Apache related people I knew would attend the conference (being a speaker and a committer at some Apache project almost certainly resulted in getting a ping).

Devoxx – Day three

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:28:26 +0100

Devoxx – Day three # The panel discussion on the future of Java was driven by visitor submitted and voted questions on the current state and future of Java. The general take-aways for me included the clear statement that the TCK will never be made available to the ASF. The promise of Oracle to continue supporting the Java community and remaining active in the JCP. There was some discussion on whether coming Java versions should be backwards-incompatible.

Devoxx – Day 2 HBase

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:25:36 +0100

Devoxx – Day 2 HBase # Devoxx featured several interesting case studies of how HBase and Hadoop can be used to scale data analysis back ends as well as data serving front ends. Twitter Dmitry Ryaboy from Twitter explained how to scale high load and large data systems using Cassandra. Looking at the sheer amount of tweets generated each day it becomes obvious that with a system like MySQL alone this site cannot be run.

Devoxx – Day two – Hadoop and HBase

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:24:40 +0100

Devoxx – Day two – Hadoop and HBase # In his session on the current state of Hadoop Tom went into a little more detail not only on the features released in the latest release or on the roadmap for upcoming releases (including Kerberos based security, append support, warm standby namenode and others). He also gave a very interesting view on the current Hadoop ecosystem. More and more projects are currently being created that either extend Hadoop or are built on top of Hadoop.

Apache Mahout Meetup in San Jose

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 07:48:49 +0100

Apache Mahout Meetup in San Jose # A few hours ago the Mahout Meetup at MapR Technologies in San Jose/CA ended. Two photos taken at the event leaked - happy to be able to publish them here. More information on the discussions and more technical details to follow. Stay tuned.

Devoxx – Day two – Caching

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:22:10 +0100

Devoxx – Day two – Caching # Day two started with a really good talk on caching architectures by Greg Luck. He first motivated why caching works: Even with SSIDs being available now there is still a huge performance gap between RAM access times and having to go to disk. The issue is even worse in systems that are architected in a distributed way making frequent calls to remote systems.

Devoxx – University – Cassandra, HBase

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:20:56 +0100

Devoxx – University – Cassandra, HBase # During the morning session FIXME Ellison gave an introduction to the distributed NoSQL database Cassandra. Being generally based on the Dynamo paper from Amazon the key-value store distributes key/value pairs according to a consistent hashing schema. Nodes can be added dynamically making the system well suited for elastic scaling. In contrast to Dynamo, Cassandra can be tuned for the required consistency level. The system is tuned for storing moderately sized key/value pairs.

Devoxx University – MongoDB, Mahout

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:19:39 +0100

Devoxx University – MongoDB, Mahout # The second tutorial was given by Roger Bodamer on MongoDB. It concentrates on being horizontally scalable by avoiding joins and complex, multi document transactions. It supports a new data model that allows for flexible, changeable “schemas”. The exact data layout is determined by the types of operations you expect for your application, by the access patterns (reading vs. writing data; types of updates and types of queries).

Frau Holle, Frau Holle

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 18:32:10 +0100

Frau Holle, Frau Holle # 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.

Devoxx University – Productive programmer, HBase

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 21:17:50 +0100

Devoxx University – Productive programmer, HBase # The first day at Devoxx featured several tutorials – most interesting to me was the pragramatic programmer. The speaker also is the author of the equally named book at O’Reilly. The book was the result of the observation that developers today are more and more IDE bound, no longer able to use the command line effectively. The result are developers that are unnecessarily slow when creating software.

Devoxx Antwerp

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 21:16:07 +0100

Devoxx Antwerp # With 3000 attendees Devoxx is the largest Java Community conference world-wide. Each year in autumn it takes place in Antwerp/ Belgium, in recent years in the Metropolis cinema. The conference tickets were sold out long before doors were opened this year. The focus of the presentations are mainly on enterprise Java featuring talks by famous Joshua Bloch, Mark Reihnhold and others on new features of the upcoming JDK release as well as intricacies of the Java programming language itself.

Teddy in Amsterdam Schiphol

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:11:36 +0100

Teddy in Amsterdam Schiphol # Caught Teddy just before the plane took off:

Teddy in Lisbon

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:09:14 +0100

Teddy in Lisbon # After Apache Con I spent a few days in Lisbon for Codebits. The conference is not developers-only. It is more of a mixture of hacking event, conference, exhibition. Though the location was not optimal for giving presentations (large exhibition hall with now a rather noisy presentation area) the whole event brought quite an interesting mixture of people together in one place in the capital of Portugal.

Mahout in Action

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:07:27 +0100

Mahout in Action # Flying to Atlanta I finally had a few hours of time to finalize the review of the Mahout in Action MEAP edition. The book is intended for potential users of the Apache Mahout, a project focussing on implementing scalable algorithms for machine learning. Describing machine learning algorithms and their application to practioners is a non-trivial task: Usually there is more than one algorithm available for seemingly identically problem settings.

Apache Con – Wrap up

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 23:27:58 +0100

Apache Con – Wrap up # After one week of lots of interesting input the ASF’s user conference was over. With a focus on Apache software users quite a few talks are not too well suited for conference regulars but more or less targeted at newbies who want to know who too successfully apply the software. As a developer of Mahout with close ties to the Lucene and Hadoop community what is of course most interesting to me are stories of users putting the software into production.

Christmas Scrumtisch

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:59:28 +0100

Christmas Scrumtisch # Today the last Scrumtisch Berlin in 2010 took place in Friedrichshain. Thanks to Marion Eickmann and Andrea Tomasini for organising the Scrum user group regularly for the past years. Though no presentation had been scheduled ahead of time the Scrumtisch was well attended by over twenty people, mostly from companies based in Berlin who are either using Scrum already or are currently in a transition phase.

Teddy in Atlanta

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 23:24:29 +0100

Teddy in Atlanta # While I was happily attending Apache Con US in Atlanta/GA my teddy had a closer look at the city: He first went to the centennial olympic park, took a picture of the world of coca-cola (wondering what strange kinds of museums there are in the US. After that he headed over to Midtown having a quiet time in the Piedmont park. And finally had a closer look at the private houses still decorated for Halloween.

Apache Con – last day

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 23:23:30 +0100

Apache Con – last day # Day three of Apache Con started with interesting talks on Tomcat 7, including an introduction to the new features of that release. Those include better memory leak prevention and detection capabilities – the implementation of these capabilities have lead to the discovery of various leaks that appear under more or less weird circumstances in famous open source libraries and the JVM itself. But also better management and reporting facilities are part of the new release.

Apache Con – Mahout, commons and Lucene

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:21:40 +0100

Apache Con – Mahout, commons and Lucene # The second day the track interesting to me provided an overview of some of the Apache commons projects. So seemingly small in scope and light-weight in implementation and dependencies these projects provide vital features not yet well supported by the Sun JVM. There is a commons math implementation featuring a fair amount of algebraic, numeric and trigonometric functions (among others), the commons exec framework for executing processes externally to the JVM w/o running into the danger of creating dead-locks or wasting resources.

ApacheCon - Keynotes

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 23:20:10 +0100

ApacheCon - Keynotes # The first keynote was given by Dana Blankenhorn – a journalist and blogger regularly publishing tech articles with a clear focus on open source projects. Focussed on the evolution of open source projects with a special focus on Apache. Coming from a research background the keynote given by Daniel Crichton from NASA was very interesting to me: According to the speaker scientists are facing challenges that are all to known to large and distributed corporations.

Apache Con – Hadoop, HBase, Httpd

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 23:19:10 +0100

Apache Con – Hadoop, HBase, Httpd # The first Apache Con day featured several presentations on NoSQL databases (track sponsored by Day software), a Hadoop track as well as presentations on Httpd and an Open source business track. Since its inception Hadoop always was intended to be run in trusted environments firewalled from hostile users or even attackers. As such it never really supported any security features. This is about the change with the new Hadoop release including better Kerberos based security.

Apache Con – Hackathon days

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:17:53 +0100

Apache Con – Hackathon days # This year on Halloween I left for a trip to Atlanta/GA. Apache Con US was supposed to take place there featuring two presentations on Apache Mahout – one by Grant Ingersoll explaining how to use Mahout to provide better search features in Solr, one by myself with a general introduction to what features Mahout provides, giving a bit more detailed information on how to use Mahout for classificaiton.

Travelling

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:17:49 +0100

Travelling # Currently on my way back from a series of conferences in the past three weeks in the IC from Schiphol. After three weeks of conferences, lots of new input and lots of interesting projects I learned about it is finally time to head back and put the stuff I have learned to good use. View Travelling in a larger map As seems normal with open source conferences I got far more input on interesting projects than I can expect to ever get applied in on a daily basis.

Apache Mahout 0.4 release

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:21:28 +0100

Apache Mahout 0.4 release # On last Sunday the Apache Mahout project published the 0.4 release. Nearly every piece of the code has been refactored and improved since the last 0.3 release. The release was timed to happen exactly before Apache Con NA in Atlanta. As such it was published on October 31st - the Halloween release, sort-of. Especially mentionable are the following improvements: Model refactoring and CLI changes to improve integration and consistency

Scrumtisch November

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:31:04 +0100

Scrumtisch November # Title: Scrumtisch November Location: Berlin Link out: Click here Description: Next Scrum meetup - Scrumtisch - is scheduled to take place end of November in Berlin FHain. See you there (that is at La Vecchia Trattoria) if you are interested in agile development. Please make sure to register with Marion first. Start Time: 18:30 Date: 2010-11-29

Apache Mahout @ Devoxx Tools in Action Track

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:32:26 +0100

Apache Mahout @ Devoxx Tools in Action Track # This year’s Devoxx will feature several presentations coming from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem including Tom White on the basics of Hadoop: HDFS, MapReduce, Hive and Pig as well as Michael Stack on HBase. In addition there will be a brief Tools in Action presentation on Monday evening featuring Apache Mahout. Please let me know if you are going to Devoxx - would be great to meet some more Apache people there, maybe have dinner at one of the conference days.

Apache Mahout @ Lisbon Codebits

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 09:36:43 +0100

Apache Mahout @ Lisbon Codebits # Second week of November I’ll spend a few days in Lisbon - never would have thought that I’d return so quickly when I visited this beautiful city this summer during vacation. I’ll be there for Codebits - thanks to Sapo for inviting me to be there. Back in summer I learned only after I returned to Germany that there was someone form Portugal seeking to meet with other Apache people exactly when I was down there.

First steps with git

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:47:00 +0200

First steps with git # A few weeks ago I started to use git not only for tracking changes in my own private repository but also for Mahout development and for reviewing patches. My setup probably is a bit unusual, so I thought, I’d first describe that before diving deeper into the specifc steps. Workflow to implement With my development I wanted to follow Mahout trunk very closely, integrating and merging any changes as soon as I continue to work on the code.

Scientific debugging

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:09:28 +0200

Scientific debugging # Quite some years ago I ready Why programs fail - a systematic guide to debugging - a book written on the art of debugging programs written by Andreas Zeller (Prof. at University Saarbrücken, researcher working on Mining Software Archives, Automated Debugging, Mutation Testing and Mining Models and one of the authors of famous Data Display Debugger). One aspect that I found particularly intriguing about the book was up to then known to me only from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Scientific debugging as a way to find bugs in a piece of software in a structured way with methods usually known from the scientific method.

CfP: Data Analysis Dev Room at Fosdem 2011

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 06:56:56 +0200

CfP: Data Analysis Dev Room at Fosdem 2011 # Call for Presentations: Data Analysis Dev Room, FOSDEM http://fosdem.org 5 February 2011 1pm to 7pm Brussels, Belgium This is to announce the Data Analysis DevRoom co-located with FOSDEM. The first Meetup on analysing and learning from data, taking place in Brussels, Belgium. Important Dates (all dates in GMT +2): Submission deadline: 2010-12-17 Notification of accepted speakers: 2010-12-20 Publication of final schedule: 2011-01-10

Video: Max Heimel on sequence tagging w/ Apache Mahout

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:58:52 +0200

Video: Max Heimel on sequence tagging w/ Apache Mahout # Some time ago Max Heimel from TU Berlin gave presentation of the new HMM support in the Mahout 0.4 release at the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin: Mahout Max Heimel from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. Thanks to JTeam for sponsoring video taping, thanks to newthinking for providing the location and thanks to Martin Schmidt from newthinking for producing the video.

Machine Learning Gossip Meeting Berlin

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:51:25 +0200

Machine Learning Gossip Meeting Berlin # This evening the first Machine Learning Gossip meeting is scheduled to take place at 9p.m. at Victoriabar: Professionals working in research advancing machine learning algorithms and industry projects putting machine learning algorithms to practical use meet for some drinks, food and hopefully lots of interesting discussions. If successful the meeting is supposed to take place on a regular schedule. Ask Michael Brückner for the date and location of the next meetup.

Part 4: Constant evaluation and improvement: Finding sources for feedback.

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 08:13:08 +0200

Part 4: Constant evaluation and improvement: Finding sources for feedback. # In recent years demand for shorter feedback cycles especially in software development has increased. Agile development, lean management and even Scrum are all for short feedback cycles: Coming from the dark ages when software projects would last for months or even years before any results could be delivered to customers we are transforming development into a process that integrates the customer in the design and evolution of his own product.

Video: Sebastian Schelter on Recommendation w/ Apache Mahout

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:55:25 +0200

Video: Sebastian Schelter on Recommendation w/ Apache Mahout # A few weeks ago we had the autumn edition of the Apache Hadoop Get Together in newthinking store in Berlin. I am glad to announce the first video online: Mahout Sebastian Schelter from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. Thanks to JTeam for sponsoring video taping, thanks to newthinking for providing the location and thanks to Martin Schmidt from newthinking for producing the video.

Apache Mahout at Apache Con NA

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:39:30 +0200

Apache Mahout at Apache Con NA # The upcoming Apache Con NA to take place in Atlanta will feature several tracks relevant to users of Apache Mahout, Lucene and Hadoop: There will be a full track on Hadoop as well as one on NoSQL on Wednesday featuring talks on the framework itself, Pig and Hive as well as presentations from users on special use cases and on their way of getting the system to production.

Salsa steps

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:50:57 +0200

Salsa steps # If you always wanted to start learning Salsa and never really had the time to do so: Today a new beginners’ course starts at Salsa Con Corazon in Berlin Schöneberg. The course is still open for registration teaching the very basics in four sessions - one per week.

Slides available

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 09:19:20 +0200

Slides available # Yesterday evening the Autumn Hadoop Get Together took place in Berlin. The meetup this time focussed mainly on latest developments at Apache Mahout. The meetup was kindly sponsored by JTeam, providing video taping of the presentations as well as for free drinks. Thanks a lot for that. After the meetup the group went over to Cafe Aufsturz for drinks, food and lots of interesting discussions - I left them there as I still have to get rid of a persistent cold.

Reminder: Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin Today

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:52:07 +0200

Reminder: Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin Today # Just a brief reminder: The Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin is supposed to take place today in newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48 at 5p.m. The meeting features two talks on Apache Mahout: Committer Sebastian Schelter will explain how to scale recommender systems with Mahout. Contributor Max Heimel is going to give an introduction to the sequence labeling facilities available in Mahout. As usual the group will move over to Cafe Aufsturz after the meetup is over.

A Get Together Checklist

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:38:28 +0200

A Get Together Checklist # Still on the list of potentially interesting books: The Checklist Manifesto - explaining why checklists can still be valuable - especially for complex problems and tasks. Though not very complex, I chose to come up with a checklist for running a Hadoop Get Together in Berlin as an exercise. I’m trying to stick with advise provided by the Checklist for Checklists. Parties involved Find two to three speakers two months in advance.

Apache Dinner October Today in Potsdam

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 08:16:14 +0200

Apache Dinner October Today in Potsdam # The Apache Dinner Berlin will take place today. As always, everybody is invited even if you didn’t participate in the poll ( http://doodle.com/8bi2456enwe6z2g6). This time around the dinner was organised by Daniel Naber. Thanks! When: Monday, 2010-10-04, 19:30 Where: Lindencafe, Rudolf-Breitscheid-Str. 47/48, 14482 Potsdam-Babelsberg, This is directly next to the S-Bahn (S7, Babelsberg). Looking forward to meeting you there!

Are devs contributing to OSS happier?

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:18:58 +0200

Are devs contributing to OSS happier? # When talking to fellow developers or meeting with students it happens from time to time that I get the question of why on earth I spent my freetime working on an open source project? Why do I spend weekends at developers’ conferences like FOSDEM? Why do spent afternoons organising meetups? Why is it that I am reviewing and writing code after work for free?

Apprenticeship patterns (O'Reilly)

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:17:45 +0200

Apprenticeship patterns (O’Reilly) # A few days ago I finished reading the book “Apprenticeship Patterns” - Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman, by Dave Hoover, Adewale Oshineye. The book is addressed to readers who have the goal of becoming great software devleopers. One naive question one could ask is why there is a need for such a book at all? Students are trained in computer science at university, then enter some IT departement and simply learn from their peers.

Apache dinner wrap-up

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:19:22 +0200

Apache dinner wrap-up # Today three Lucene committers, two Mahout committers (one of them also being committer of Lucene: Hi Karl, was great having you here - see you at the next Hadoop Get Together, or maybe some day for lunch.), several users of Lucene and Hadoop together with their family (including a very cute, unbelievably quiet three weeks old baby) met at Jamerica - a restaurant offering American as well as Jamaican food in Schöneberg.

Apache Dinner this evening

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:00:59 +0200

Apache Dinner this evening # This evening the September Apache Dinner takes place in Jamerica Schöneberg. I have booked a table for ten to fifteen people - we’ll see whether that is sufficient this time :) Looking forward to see you there at 7p.m.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - October 2010

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 07:31:13 +0200

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - October 2010 # This is to announce the next Apache Hadoop Get Together sponsored by JTeam that will take place in newthinking store in Berlin. When: October 7th, 5p.m. Where: Newthinking store Berlin, Tucholksystr. 48 As always there will be slots of 30min each for talks on your Hadoop topic. After each talk there will be a lot time to discuss. You can order drinks directly at the bar in the newthinking store.

Part 3: A polite way to say no - and why there are times when it does not work.

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:05:13 +0200

Part 3: A polite way to say no - and why there are times when it does not work. # After having shared my thoughts on how to improve focus and how to track tasks eating up time this post will explain how to keep time invested at a more or less constant level. The goal of this exercise is to keep obligations at a reasonable level - be it at work or during ones spare time.

Part 2: Tracking tasks, or - Where the hack did my time go to last week?

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:22:43 +0200

Part 2: Tracking tasks, or - Where the hack did my time go to last week? # After summarising some strategies for not loosing track of tasks, meetings and conferences in the last post, this one is going to focus on the retrospect on achievements. If at some point in time you have asked yourself “Where the hack did time go to?” - maybe after two busy weeks of work this article might have a few techniques for you.

Berlin Scrumtisch - open discussion

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:29:05 +0200

Berlin Scrumtisch - open discussion # This evening the Berlin Scrumtisch took place in Friedrichshain. More than thirty participants followed Marion’s invitation for discussions on Scrum, wine and pizza at Vecchia Trattoria. As there were several new participants, Felix started out with a very brief summary of the very core concepts of Scrum itself: Most important to know is the basic assumption of Scrum, that is planning ahead of time in a very detailed way is impossible.

Apache Dinner DUS

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:10:10 +0200

Apache Dinner DUS # the evening after FrOSCon - that is on August 22nd 2010 at 7:30p.m. CEST - a combined “FSFE Fellowship meetup/ Apache dinner*” takes place in Tigges in Düsseldorf (Brunnenstraße 1, at Bilker S-Bahnhof). Given it doesn’t rain, we’ll be sitting outside. Would be great to meet you there for tasty food, interesting discussions on Apache in general, as well as projects like Lucene, Hadoop or Tomcat in particular.

Scrumtisch August Berlin

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:26:34 +0200

Scrumtisch August Berlin # Just seen it - the next Scrumtisch Berlin has been scheduled for 25th August 2010 at 18:30 Uhr. So far, no official talk has been scheduled, so please expect two topics on Scrum and its application to be selected for discussion according to Marion’s agile topic selection algorithm. Please talk to Marion Eickmann if you would like to attend the next meetup.

Some statistics

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:03:35 +0200

Some statistics # Various research projects focus on learning more on how open source communities work: What makes people commit themselves to such projects? How much involvement from various companies is there? Do people contribute during working hours or in their spare time? Who are the most active contributors in terms of individuals and in terms of companies? When asked to fill out surveys, especially in cases where that happens for the n-th time with n being larger than say 5, software developers usually are not very likely to fill out these questionairs.

NoSQL summer Berlin - this evening

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:38:02 +0200

NoSQL summer Berlin - this evening # This evening at Volkspark Friedrichshain, Café Schoenbrunn the next NoSQL summer Berlin (organised by Tim Lossen) is meeting to discuss the paper on Amazon’s Dynamo “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store”. The group is planning to meet at 19:30 for some beer and discussions on the publication.

Apache Dinner August Berlin recap

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:54:17 +0200

Apache Dinner August Berlin recap # This evening yet another Apache Dinner took place in Berlin (this time Schöneberg), location booked by Simon Willnauer. As it was announced less then a week ago (see post below) we were expecting no more then some 7 people … we ended up being a group of 15 attendees: There was Michi Busch from Twitter together with Tanja, Uwe Schindler from Bremen joined us.

Apache Dinner Berlin - August 2010

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:52:45 +0200

Apache Dinner Berlin - August 2010 # Simon (Willnauer) just sent around the following e-mail. If you have some time left next Monday evening, come join us in Yogihaus: For tasty Indian food, geeky discussions and a generally beautiful evening. Unlike the other dinner mails this one is not a poll, it’s an announcement. Some Apache folks are in town next monday (9th of August) so we decided to have a Apache Dinner with a short term notice.

Part 1: Travelling minds

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:00:23 +0200

Part 1: Travelling minds # In the last post I promised to share some more information on techniques I came across and found useful under an increasing work load. Instead of taking a close look at my professional calendar I decided to use my private one as an example - first because spare time is even more precious then working hours, simply because there is so few of it and secondly because I am free to publicly scrutinize not only the methods for keeping it in good shape but also the entries in it.

Series: Getting things done

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:07:59 +0200

Series: Getting things done # Probably not too unusual for people working on free software mostly (though no longer exclusively) in their spare time, the number of items that appear in my private calendar have increased steadily in the past months and years: Every three months I am organising the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin. I have been asked (and accepted the offer) to publish articles on Hadoop and Lucene in magazines.

Apache Hadoop in Debian Squeeze

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:04:27 +0200

Apache Hadoop in Debian Squeeze # After using Mandrake for quite a while (still blaming my boyfriend Thilo for infecting not only my computer but also myself first with that system, then with the more general idea of Free Software but that’s another story.) after finishing my master’s thesis I started using GNU Debian Linux (back then in the version code-named Woody). Since I always had a GNU Debian on my private box as my main operating system - even installed it on my MacBook following the steps in the Debian Wiki.

Apache Lunch in Portugal

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:37:23 +0200

Apache Lunch in Portugal # Just read on the Apache community mailing list that inspired by our Apache Dinner Berlin people in Porto are organising an Apache Lunch event. As with the dinner here in Berlin, anyone who is interested in Apache is welcome to join - no need to be a committer or even ASF member ;) If you are living close to Porto, or always wanted to visit the city - after all it’s a very beautiful place, there is a beach close by, there are many tasty restaurants - don’t hesitate to get in touch with the organisers:

Teddy in Portugal

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:32:06 +0200

Teddy in Portugal # During the past two weeks my teddy was on vacation. As destination he chose to fly to Portugal. One day was reserved for a visit to Lisboa, the capital city of the country. He also took a few really nice pictures there: On his return, he was no longer alone. Seems like he found a cute little portugese girl friend: <img src="/teddyGirlFriend.png" width=“400” /> In addition he brought the following image.

Scrum - prepare your meetings

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:45:52 +0200

Scrum - prepare your meetings # “But Scrum involves so many meetings - we already have meetings like all day and don’t get to coding anything.” - “However we do need transparency and communication to build great software.” - “Actually scheduling and re-prioritising items during scrum planning takes so much time.” Does that sound familiar to you? What if you could fit Sprint Review and Planning I for a team of three people doing three week sprints into one hour?

Using Scrum for software development

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:31:11 +0200

Using Scrum for software development # A few months ago I entered a new team of until then two software developers. Being so small and with a rather busy product owner, until then people had followed the rituals of Scrum only loosely. When starting to work on a new component the three of us decided to change a few thing several weeks ago: We would setup infrastructure to be somewhat similar to what we knew from Apache projects: All issues to be accomplished were to be tracked in our issue tracker.

Scalability

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:17:53 +0200

Scalability # For Berlin Buzzwords we concentrated pretty heavily on scalable systems and architectures: We had talks on Hadoop for scaling data analysis; HBase, Cassandra and Hypertable for scaling data storage; Lucene and Solr for scaling search. A recurring pattern was people telling success stories involving project that either involve large amounts of data or growing user numbers. Of course the whole topic of scalability is extremely interesting for ambitious developers: Who would not be happy to solve internet-scale problems, have petabytes of data at his fingertips or tell others that their “other computer is a data center”.

Bye, bye Germany

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:27:46 +0200

Bye, bye Germany # … for the next two weeks: I’ll be on vacation with strict internet interdiction. Will be a tourist exploring beaches and maybe a few hiking tracks in the next few days, so don’t expect to read anything here apart from what was scheduled already ;)

Teaching Free Software Development

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:55:07 +0200

Teaching Free Software Development # In Summer last year I was invited to give a presentation on Apache Mahout at TU Berlin. After the talk was over some of the research group members asked me to design and give a course on scalable machine learning with open source software during the winter semester. The project attracted four to five students - not very many - but then again it is a course people can take voluntarily.

Service as in real good customer service

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:07:02 +0200

Service as in real good customer service # First thing to do after getting up: Go to the kitchen and switch on the coffee machine. However, one random Sunday morning that caused the fuse for exactly this kitchen to go off. After fixing that we turned on the coffee machine again - trying to finally get a first cup. All worked well until having a closer look at what the machine produced as coffee: It was cold!

Linus Torwalds on the Linux kernel community

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:10:20 +0200

Linus Torwalds on the Linux kernel community # A few days ago, Linus send a very interesting mail on why he considers C the programming language that is most suitable for the Linux kernel. Despite the language specific arguments, the text contains quite a few insights on how the Linux kernel community works and communicates that might be interesting to non-kernel-hackers as well: People working for free still doesn’t mean that it’s fine

Velocity update

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:34:22 +0200

Velocity update # 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.

My highly subjective Berlin Buzzwords recap

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:32:53 +0200

My highly subjective Berlin Buzzwords recap # Last November I innocently asked Grant what it would take to make him to give a talk in Berlin. The only requirement he told me was that I’d have to pay for his flight. About eight months later we had Berlin Buzzwords - a conference all around the topics scalability, data storage and search. With Simon Willnauer, Uwe Schindler, Michael Busch, Robert Muir, Grant Ingersoll, Andrzej Bialecki and many others we had quite a few Lucene people in town.

Apache Dinner June 2010

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:54:45 +0200

Apache Dinner June 2010 # After Berlin Buzzwords was over yesterday - and as there is an svn conference in the city that starts tomorrow, we thought we could easily put together a smallish Apache Dinner for tonight. So Torsten mailed a few people, booked some space at Heinz Minki in Kreuzberg. We announced it at the end of the conference and invited people to join us. So after a beautiful day out I spent the evening with a bunch of Apache related guys and girls having drinks and great pizza: We had several svn committers, Greg Stein met us there - he arrived today for the svn conference.

Apache Dinner after Berlin Buzzwords

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:52:21 +0200

Apache Dinner after Berlin Buzzwords # Staying in town after Berlin Buzzwords? Interested in meeting with the Apache folks here? Torsten Curdt kindly organises an Apache Dinner on Wednesday evening after Berlin Buzzwords. If you would like to participate, contact Torsten for details on when and where it will take place. Though named Apache dinner, there is no need to be Apache committer or even member to participate: Being generally interested in Apache projects and in meeting the guys behind the project is totally sufficient.

Apache Dinner - May 2010

Thu, 27 May 2010 22:50:36 +0200

Apache Dinner - May 2010 # This evening a bunch of Apache committers and friends gathered in Berlin Kreuzberg at “Goodmorning Vietnam” for tasty food, nice drinks - or put another way, for a very nice evening. Simon had booked the table - we were expecting no more than eight people. However, as with any user group these meetup tends to grow. Shortly after the appointed time we had to move to another table to fit everyone around.

Scaling user groups

Wed, 26 May 2010 19:32:39 +0200

Scaling user groups # A few hours ago, Jan Lehnardt posted a link on How to organise a nerd conference - joking that this is how we planned Berlin Buzzwords. Well, it is not exactly that easy - however the comic actually is not so far from the truth either: About two years ago, after having started Apache Mahout together with Grant Ingersoll, Karl Wettin and others, several Apache Hadoop user groups, meetups and get togethers started to pop up all around the world.

Going to Berlin Buzzwords

Fri, 21 May 2010 08:46:11 +0200

Going to Berlin Buzzwords # 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. <img src=“ http://berlinbuzzwords.de/sites/berlinbuzzwords.de/files/buzzwords_banner.jpg" alt=“I’m going to Berlin Buzzwords the conference on searching, processing and storing data.”/> There are a few regular tickets left, so don’t wait too long to register.

Solving puzzles

Thu, 20 May 2010 16:44:10 +0200

Solving puzzles # 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.

Tierpark Berlin

Wed, 19 May 2010 19:36:08 +0200

Tierpark Berlin # I love taking fotos, like being outdoors and like animals. Living in a large city, it is not exactly easy to get in touch with donkeys or sheep. A very simple way to combine all three preferences here is to visit Tierpark Berlin. Being larger than your average zoo, most bawns are rather roomy with lots space outside and inside. Little more than one year ago I received a great birthday present from Thilo: It is possible to purchase a one year ticket for that park.

Getting a Ubuntu Laptop setup for my Mum

Mon, 17 May 2010 19:15:31 +0200

Getting a Ubuntu Laptop setup for my Mum # With DSL contracts getting ever cheaper in recent years in Germany – even outside larger cities – my mom decided to get a faster internet connection (compared to the former 56k modem) including a telephone landline flatrate. As sitting in the garden while surfing the internet is way cooler than only having a dedicated computer in an office we decided to get a notebook while at it.

Berlin Buzzwords 2010 - Scalability conference June 7th/ 8th in Berlin

Fri, 14 May 2010 15:48:47 +0200

Berlin Buzzwords 2010 - Scalability conference June 7th/ 8th in Berlin # The Berlin Buzzwords schedule was published a few days ago. There are tracks specific to the three tags search, store and scale. We have a fantastic mixture of developers and users of open source software projects that make scaling data processing today possible. There is Steve Loughran, Aaron Kimball and Stefan Groschupf from the Apache Hadoop community. We have Grant Ingersoll, Robert Muir and the “Generics Policeman” Uwe Schindler from the Lucene community.

Apache Dinner - April 2010

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:43:25 +0200

Apache Dinner - April 2010 # Today, the April Apache Dinner took place in Berlin. We met at Sadhu - an Indian restaurant in Berlin X-Berg. We were six people: Lars Trieloff from Day Software, Simon Willnauer and Vera from Lucene, Torsten Curdt - currently Freelancer and Daniel Naber from Lucene as well. With great food, nice discussions and a first glimpse on the submissions for Berlin Buzzwords it quickly got later and later :)

Apache Dinner Berlin - next Monday

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:00:45 +0200

Apache Dinner Berlin - next Monday # Next Monday at 7p.m. the April Apache Dinner Berlin is scheduled to take place. Thanks to Torsten Curdt for organising the dinner - as in: Contacting people, finding a suitable data, booking the location etc. Looking forward to another nice evening at an awesome restaurant with tasty indian food. If you’d like to join us, please contact Torsten to be included in the next announcement mail.

Berlin Buzzwords - End of CfP drawing closer

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:55:52 +0200

Berlin Buzzwords - End of CfP drawing closer # 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 - Early bird registration

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:02:03 +0200

Berlin Buzzwords - Early bird 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.

Working on Mahout as part of your studies at TU Berlin

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:37:43 +0200

Working on Mahout as part of your studies at TU Berlin # Did you ever wonder, who those weird people working on free software projects are? Did you ever ask yourself how these developers organise their work, how they collaborate, which values are important to them? Did you ever think about participating in a free software project yourself but never really had time to do so because your studies were just too time-consuming?

GSoC - one day to go for your application

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:37:42 +0200

GSoC - one day to go for your application # If you are a student interested in participating in Google Summer of Code: Registration closes tomorrow (as in “April 9, 19:00 UTC”). You hopefully published and discussed your proposal at your favourite project already so you have a clear plan of where to go and which milestones to achieve in summer. If you are interested in Apache Mahout: Yes, as last years, we are again looking for students willing to work on awesome student projects this summer.

Coaching self-organising teams

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:58:54 +0200

Coaching self-organising teams # Today, the Scrumtisch organised by Marion Eickmann from Agile 42 met in Berlin Friedrichshain. Though no talk was scheduled for this evening the room was packed with guests from various companies and backgrounds interested in participating in discussions on Scrum. As usual we started collecting topics (timeboxed to five minutes). The list was rather short, however it contained several interesting pieces: (6) Management buy-in (6+) CSP - Certified Scrum Professional - what changes compared to the practitioner?

Some pictures

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:00:15 +0100

Some pictures # Uwe and Simon were so kind to take some pictures of the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin: <img src="/hadoop_march_1.JPG" alt=“Image Hadoop Get Together Berlin” /> <img src="/hadoop_march_5.JPG" alt=“Image Hadoop Get Together Berlin” /> Thanks for the pictures.

Bob Schulze on Tips and patterns with HBase

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:41:42 +0100

Bob Schulze on Tips and patterns with HBase # At the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin Bob Schulze from eCircle in Munich gave a presentation on “Tips and patterns with HBase”. The talk has been video recorded. The result is now available online: HBase Bob Schulze from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. Feel free to share and distribute the video. Thanks to Bob for an awesome talk on eCircle’s usage of HBase - and on providing some background information on how HBase was applied to solve your problems.

Dragan Milosevic on Product Search and Reporting with Hadoop

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:30:48 +0100

Dragan Milosevic on Product Search and Reporting with Hadoop # At the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin Dragan Milosevic from zanox in Berlin gave a presentation on “Product Search and Reporting powered by Hadoop”. The talk has been video recorded. The result is now available online: <param name=“allowscriptaccess” value=“always” />Hadoop Dragan Milosevic from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. Feel free to share and distribute the video. Thanks to Dragan for a fantastic talk on Zanox’ usage of Hadoop - and on providing some background information on why and how you introduced Hadoop into your systems.

Apache Mahout 0.3 released

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:22:51 +0100

Apache Mahout 0.3 released # This week, Apache Mahout 0.3 was released. First of all thanks to all committers and contributors who made that possible: Thanks for all your hard work on making the code even faster and integrating even more algorithms. To the highlights: New: math and collections modules based on the high performance Colt library Faster Frequent Pattern Growth(FPGrowth) using FP-bonsai pruning Parallel Dirichlet process clustering (model-based clustering algorithm)

Seminar on scaling learning at DIMA TU Berlin

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:10:38 +0100

Seminar on scaling learning at DIMA TU Berlin # Last Thursday the seminar on scaling learning problems took place at DIMA at TU Berlin. We had five students give talks. The talks started with an introduction to map reduce. Oleg Mayevskiy first explained the basic concept, than gave an overview of the parallelization architecture and finally showed how jobs can be formulated as map reduce jobs. His paper as well as his slides are available online.

Chris Male on spatial search with Lucene

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:42:14 +0100

Chris Male on spatial search with Lucene # Last week the March 2010 Hadoop Get Together took place in Berlin. Last speaker was Chris Male on spatial search with Lucene and Solr. The video is now available online: Lucene Chris Male from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. Feel free to share and distribute the video to anyone who might be interested. Thank you Chris, for traveling over from Amsterdam for an awesome talk on spatial search.

Definition of a Blogger

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:17:34 +0100

Definition of a Blogger # While at lunch yesterday the topic of what Bloggers do, how they earn money and most important of all - what the hack a blogger really is - came up. Well, some criteria those who went to a restaurant nearby came up with the following criteria: Blog is read by more than 5 people. (Well, in my opinion a very low barrier, really.) Bloggers tend to get invited to give talks at conferences.

Third Apache Dinner Berlin

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:04:41 +0100

Third Apache Dinner Berlin # Today the third Dinner for Apache committers and friends took place in Berlin. We met in Schöneberg at Marcello Berlin for pizza, pasta, wine, beer … and lots of discussions. It always surprises me to see how many Apache related people there are in Berlin. This time we had Peter from Tomcat, Daniel and Simon with Vera from Lucene, Eric from http components, four guys from the svn project (Welcome again at the ASF), Oswald and myself and Thilo.

Building a Hadoop Job Jar with Maven

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:16:14 +0100

Building a Hadoop Job Jar with Maven # Put here as a reminder, so I do not forget about it. There is a really nice tutorial online on Building Hadoop Job with Maven.

Call for presentations - Berlin Buzzwords

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:09:09 +0100

Call for presentations - Berlin Buzzwords # 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:

Slides are available

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:49:41 +0100

Slides are available # Slides for the last Hadoop Get Together are available online: Spatial Search by Chris Male HBase Patterns by Bob Schulze Scaling product search with Hadoop and Lucene by Dragan Milosevic My own little introduction, just in case you are interested. Videos will follow as soon as the are ready. Watch this space for further updates.

Apache Hadoop Get Together March 2010

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:40:36 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together March 2010 # Today (or more correctly, yesterday) the March 2010 Hadoop Get Together took place in newthinking store. I arrived rather early to have some time to do some planning for Berlin Buzzwords - got there nearly one hour before the meetup. However it did not take very long until first guests came to the store. So I quickly got my introductory slides in place - Martin from newthinking already had the room setup, camera in place and audio working.

Google Summer of Code starting

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:10:44 +0100

Google Summer of Code starting # As published on the Google Open Source blog the application period for mentoring organizations for GSoC starts now. The ASF is already in the process of applying. If you are a student, looking for an interesting project to work on during the coming summer - you might consider participating in GSoC. It does give you are great opportunity to get in touch with successful free software projects, learn how to work in global teams, improve your communication skills and last but not least show and publish your fantastic coding skills.

Learning to Rank Challenge

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:49:53 +0100

Learning to Rank Challenge # In one of his recent blog posts, Jeff Dalton published an article on currently running machine learning challenges. Especially interesting for those working on search engines and interested in learning new rankings from data should be the Yahoo! Learning to Rank Challenge to be held in conjunction with this year’s ICML 2010 in Haifa, Israel. The goal is to show that your algorithm does not only scale on real-world data provided by Yahoo!

Early bird registration for Berlin Buzzwords on June 7th/8th open

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:34:44 +0100

Early bird registration for Berlin Buzzwords on June 7th/8th open # Silently registration was opened in the past days for Berlin Buzzwords - a conference on scaling search, data processing and storage taking place on June 7th/8th in Berlin/ Germany. First 100 tickets will be sold for 250 Euros + tax. Registration is possible at later dates as well, however expect prizes to rise shortly before the conference starts.

Chemnitzer Linuxtage

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:32:14 +0100

Chemnitzer Linuxtage # Title: Chemnitzer Linuxtage Location: Chemnitz Link out: Click here Start Date: 2010-03-13 End Date: 2010-03-14 Next week the Chemnither Linuxtage take place in - well - Chemnitz. It is the second largest Linux event after Linuxtag Berlin. However only obvious for speakers and exhibitors: It is one of those events that are known for its fantastic organisation. Nearly no problems, be it WiFi, admission to the exhibitors area, food or any help in general.

Mahout at Berlin ignite

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:24:48 +0100

Mahout at Berlin ignite # This evening the first Berlin ignite event took place in the “Festsaal” in Berlin X-Berg. Organiser of the event was Matt Biddulph from Nokia Gate 5. We had eleven fantastic talks (ok, to be more precise: At least ten fantastic ones, my own can only be judged by the audience ;) ). Topics included things you can learn when starting to collect data, themes from (agile) project management, RepRap machines (see also the Rep Rap FOSDEM 2010 talk), bots and robots.

Preliminary schedule online for ignite Berlin

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:13:37 +0100

Preliminary schedule online for ignite Berlin # Today first talks scheduled for ignite Berlin were published. If you yourself would like to give a talk: Submission seems to still be open.

Alan Atlas at Scrumtisch Berlin

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:35:43 +0100

Alan Atlas at Scrumtisch Berlin # At the last Berlin Scrumtisch, @AlanAtlas gave a presentation on how he introduced Scrum at Amazon (starting as early as back in 2004). Introducing Scrum at Amazon by that time seemed natural due to a few factors: Amazon was and is always very customer centric. The original methodology of working backwards in time - that is starting with the press release, from there writing the FAQ and manual and finally get to the code - really made people concentrate on the product.

Apache brand name - survey

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:03:35 +0100

Apache brand name - survey # Sally Khudairi (VP, ASF Marketing & Publicity) asked for distributing the following survey to people who might be interested in contributing their views to a study on how the brand name Apache is perceived. Me personally, I would be especially interested in finding out more on whether there are any differences in perception inside the ASF vs. outside… We have been working with PhD candidate Roland Schroll over the past two years as he’s been compiling information on the value of the Apache brand.

MLOSS workshop at ICML accepted

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:31:02 +0100

MLOSS workshop at ICML accepted # The workshop on machine learning open source software has been accpted. Find further details on the workshop homepage. Submissions are open until April 10th, Samoa time.

FOSDEM - video recordings online

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:32:32 +0100

FOSDEM - video recordings online # As published in the FOSDEM blog the video recordings are available online - at least for the main track and the lightning talks. Happy video watching!

FSFE Happy Valentine

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 07:05:09 +0100

FSFE Happy Valentine # Today I got woken up with a friendly hug and roses waiting for me: I do not really care about presents for sort-of-artificial celebration days like valentines day. However, FSFE had a very nice idea: The proposal was to use valentines day to show your love for free software. The website proposed to e.g. hug a free software developer, to make a gift to a team of free software developers:

Open Community Camp 2010

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:07:20 +0100

Open Community Camp 2010 # The following information just reached my via Marten Vijn. Thought it might be interesting to you: I am pleased to announce OpenCommunityCamp 2010. The camp is from 10th to 18th July, in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands. The website[1] is refreshed and the first speakers are booked. It is time to register[2] if you plan be there (please do this quickly). Currently we need to find more people to attend, self-organizing groups

Berlin Buzzwords - June 2010

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:42:16 +0100

Berlin Buzzwords - June 2010 # As announced at FOSDEM: Early June (currently scheduled for 7th/8th) a conference on the topics scalable search, storage and processing will take place in Kalkscheune/Berlin. The conference is co-organised by newthinking store, Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer, Thilo Fromm, and Isabel Drost. The focus will be on NoSQL databases like CouchDB, Jackrabbit, MongoDB, HBase. Search tracks will cover topics like Lucene, Solr, katta and others.

Apache Hadoop Get Together - March 2010 - Update

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:25:03 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together - March 2010 - Update # Due to conflicts in the schedule of newthinking store, we had to change the time of the Get Together slightly. We will start one hour earlier than announced. When: March 10th, 4p.m. Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin Mitte Looking forward to seeing you there.

FOSDEM 2010 - part 3

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:02:18 +0100

FOSDEM 2010 - part 3 # Sunday started in Janson with Andrian Bowyer’s talk on RepRap machines, that is devices that can be used as manufacturing devices and are able to replicate themselves. After that I went over to the Mono dev room to listen to Miguel de Icaza on Mono Edge. A great talk on the history of Mono, the way the community interacts with Microsoft, the C# language itself and special features only available in Mono.

FOSDEM 2010 - part 2

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:00:35 +0100

FOSDEM 2010 - part 2 # The event itself featured 306 talks - so pretty hard to choose what to watch on two days. This time, not only the main tracks were awesome, but also several dev rooms featured very interesting talks by well known FOSS developers. Saturday started with a FOSDEM birthday dance done by all attendees. The first keynote speaker Brooks Davis explained his experiences promoting open source methods at a large company.

FOSDEM visitor seems to like my baby

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:19:28 +0100

FOSDEM visitor seems to like my baby # <img src=“ http://img.mobypicture.com/72f4dd04dc8f74e0bf9203189744f9ed_view.jpg" alt=“Posted using Mobypicture.com” /> Another picture that was taken before the first session early in the morning:

FOSDEM 2010 - part 1

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:00:34 +0100

FOSDEM 2010 - part 1 # Four years ago I was working in Saarbrücken. From there it is a very short ride over to FOSDEM (little more than 300km). So I decided - hey, why not stay there for a weekend. I found a very nice Brussels bed and breakfast hotel called Rovignon - featuring not only comfortable rooms at reasonable prizes but also cats in the house. Back then, I barely knew anyone at the conference.

FOSDEM 2010 - 10 years FOSDEM

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:33:33 +0100

FOSDEM 2010 - 10 years FOSDEM # The final schedule of FOSDEM 2010 is up: Looks like bad news - 306 interesting talks within just one weekend. Lots of interesting talks in the main track including Greg Kroah-Hartman on “Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch”, David Recordon from Facebook on “Scaling Facebook with OpenSource tools”, Bernard Li on “Ganglia: 10 years of monitoring clusters and grids”, Andrew Tanenbaum with his “MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System” talk, Benoît Chesneau on “CouchDB!

Hadoop trainings in Europe

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:23:19 +0100

Hadoop trainings in Europe # Recently I received this mail from Christophe Bisciglia on Cloudera Hadoop trainings. Thought it might be interesting to the Hadoop Berlin community: Hadoop Fans, Over the next year, you’ll see new options for Hadoop training and certification from Cloudera. One of the first things you’ll see will be live sessions outside the US, tentatively planned for the April / May time frame. We’ve seen strong interest in Hadoop on all of our international

Shopping at Ikea

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:17:03 +0100

Shopping at Ikea # Some weeks ago, Thilo had a tiny little gadget not to be missed in an average geek’s appartment: A server - admittedly a little old and a bit slow, but still usable for playing around. He installed Ubuntu server on it. At the evening we got it configured to run Hadoop. Little later we found out that some friends of us probably, maybe have some usable hardware left as well - we’ll see on Monday.

Hadoop at Heise c't

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:37:19 +0100

Hadoop at Heise c’t # <surreptitious_advertising> Interesting for those readers speaking German: Heise published an introductory article on Hadoop in its latest issue. Have fun reading. <surreptitious_advertising/> Thanks to Simon for proof-reading and providing valuable input. Thanks to Thilo Fromm for the hadoop graphics (unfortunately none of them got published in its original form), the catchy title, proof-reading the text over and over again and for keeping me sane during several past and coming months.

March 2010 Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:40:52 +0100

March 2010 Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # This is to announce the next Apache Hadoop Get Together that will take place in newthinking store in Berlin. When: March 10th, 4p.m. Where: Newthinking store Berlin As always there will be slots of 20min each for talks on your Hadoop topic. After each talk there will be a lot time to discuss. You can order drinks directly at the bar in the newthinking store.

The 7 deadly sins of (Java) software developers

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:09:46 +0100

The 7 deadly sins of (Java) software developers # On Lucid Imaginations Blog Jay Hill published a great article on The seven deadly sins of solr. Basically it is a collection of his experiences “analyzing and evaluating a great many instances of Solr implementations, running in some of the largest Fortune 500 companies”. It is a collection of common mistakes, mis-configurations and pitfalls in Solr installations in production use.

Apache Dinner January 2010

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:48:29 +0100

Apache Dinner January 2010 # This evening in X-Berg several local committers met for the second “Apache Dinner” - an informal gathering of local Apache committers, friends and associates for food, beer and interesting discussions. Next one is probably to be scheduled some time in February. Feel free to send a message to Torsten Curdt to be included on the next invitation mail. Thanks for organizing a nice evening, Torsten.

Mahout in Action

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:22:32 +0100

Mahout in Action # As noted earlier by Grant Ingersoll, the first chapters of Mahout in Action are already online at Manning: Sean, Robin, keep up the great work! I would love to read more of the book in the near future.

How much of Scrum is implemented?

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:36:17 +0100

How much of Scrum is implemented? # I have started using Scrum for various purposes: It has inspired the way software is developed at my current employer. I use it to organize a students’ project at university. In addition we are using it at home to get all personal tasks (preparing breakfast, doing the laundry, meeting with friends…) in line for each week. Constantly looking for ways to evaluate, refine and improve work - I am also looking for ideas on how to evaluate which aspects of the Scrum implementation can actually be improved.

Third "December Hadoop Get Together" video online

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:29:28 +0100

Third “December Hadoop Get Together” video online # In the following video taken at the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin Jörg Möllenkamp explains why Hadoop is interesting for Sun - and why Sun Hardware might be a good fit for Hadoop applications: Hadoop Jörg Möllenkamp from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. In a blog post published after the event, Jörg gives more details on his idea of Parasitic Hadoop he introduced at the meetup.

Second December Hadoop Get Together video

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:57:13 +0100

Second December Hadoop Get Together video # Richard Hutton from nugg.ad explained how they scaled their ad recommendation system to an increasing number of users with the help of Hadoop. To learn more on their use case and details on which problems they solved with Hadoop, watch the video below: Hadoop Richard Hutton from Isabel Drost on Vimeo.

With a little help from my friends

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:55:22 +0100

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.

First December Apache Hadoop Berlin video online

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:27:24 +0100

First December Apache Hadoop Berlin video online # The video of Nikolaus’ Pohle’s talk at the December Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin is online already - more to come soon. hadoop nikolaus pohle from Isabel Drost on Vimeo. Thanks to Martin from newthinking for video taping and uploading. Thanks to StudiVZ for sponsoring the video.

Screws are out

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:45:27 +0100

Screws are out # Before:Some time in between:After: On December 22nd those screws got taken out of my knee: Early in the morning (early as in arrive at 6:45am) I was to be at the hospital. In return I was allowed to go home the same day in the afternoon: Finally some time for reading and refining MAHOUT-85 ;)

Winter arrived at Berlin

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:10:55 +0100

Winter arrived at Berlin # Finally winter seems to have arrived at Berlin as well: Looks a little like Christmas is drawing closer. Only disadvantage of the weather: One of the breaks of my bike was frozen after very few minutes. Luckily for me, my bike has one of those old-fashioned back pedal brakes ;)

Summary - December Get Together

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:23:20 +0100

Summary - December Get Together # Today the seventh Apache Hadoop Get Together took place in Berlin. The room was again packed with more than 40 people from various companies with and without practical experience with Hadoop: There were people from Nokia Gate 5, Sun, nurago, StudiVZ, Dawanda, Last.fm, nugg.ad. There were people from academia, e.g. HPI Potsdam. And a few Freelancers interested in the topic or providing help with Hadoop.

On Thursday: Open Hadoop User Group Munich

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:06:28 +0100

On Thursday: Open Hadoop User Group Munich # If one evening of Apache Hadoop is not enough for you: The next Christmas Meetup in Germany takes place one day later in Munich. <li When: Thursday December 17, 2009 at 5:30pm open end Where: eCircle AG, Nymphenburger Straße 86, 80636 München (“Bruckmann” Building, “U1 Mailinger Str”, map in German http://www.ecircle.com/de/kontakt/anfahrt.html and look for the signs) Talks scheduled by Bob and Lars:

On Wednesday: December Apache Hadoop @ Berlin

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:15:02 +0100

On Wednesday: December Apache Hadoop @ Berlin # This week on Wednesday at 5p.m. the December Hadoop Get Together takes place in newthinking store Berlin. Talks scheduled so far: Richard Hutton (nugg.ad): “Moving from five days to one hour.” Jörg Möllenkamp (Sun): “Hadoop on Sun” Nikolaus Pohle (nurago): “M/R for MR - Online Market Research powered by Apache Hadoop. Enable consultants to analyze online behavior for audience segmentation, advertising effects and usage patterns.

Photos the traditional way

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:05:49 +0100

Photos the traditional way # After one year of taking pictures at various occasions and at various places the pile of photos grew frighteningly large: I am not counting the images taken at Apache Con US Oakland - they are not yet developed. All other photos were taken either with an old fashioned Olympus µ-zoom or a Praktica Nova 1st. Several hours of work later, I ended up with one more book containing memories of an exciting year…

"Schneeflöckchen, Weißröckchen"

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:23:49 +0100

“Schneeflöckchen, Weißröckchen” # First snow seen this morning - seems like finally it’s winter:

Apache Hadoop at FOSDEM 2010

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:19:33 +0100

Apache Hadoop at FOSDEM 2010 #

Though the official schedule is not yet online: I will be giving an introductory talk about Apache Hadoop at next year’s FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting) in Brussles. This will be the 10th birthday of the event - looking forward to a fun event, meeting other free and open source software developers from all over Europe.

If you are a Apache Hadoop developer and would like me to include some particular topic in the talk - please feel free to contact me. If you are an Apache Hadoop user and would like to learn more on the project, please come to the talk and ask questions. If you are an Apache Hadoop Newbie - feel free to join us.

In addition there will be a NoSQL Dev Room at FOSDEM as well. The call for presentations is up already. So if you are doing fun stuff with CouchDB, HBase and friends or are a developer of these projects - submit a talk and join us in early-February in Brussles.

Reminder: Apache Hadoop Get Together next week

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:16:25 +0100

Reminder: Apache Hadoop Get Together next week # Just a tiny little reminder: The Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin is scheduled to take place next week on Wednesday. When: 16th of December 8PM Where: newthinking store Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin Mitte Kindly sponsored by: newthinking store (location) and StudiVZ (videos). Please regist er (or use Xing for registration) so planning becomes a bit easier. Talks scheduled: Richard Hutton (nugg.ad): “Moving from five days to one hour.

Berlin hospital chaos (Charite)

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:05:15 +0100

Berlin hospital chaos (Charite) # What getting screws out of your knee looks like at Charite: Got sent to “Virchow Klinikum” by my doctor back home: I got some recommendations for it from my colleagues and is easy to reach for me. Called up there earlier this week and got an appointment for today at 8:30 a.m. (was already wondering, that this was possible so quickly). Arrived this morning: But seems like I was out of luck - no one at the hospital knew about the appointment.

Sesat - moving from FAST to Solr

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:07:49 +0100

Sesat - moving from FAST to Solr # The article was first published on Sesat Weblog. As the whole site went down several days ago, I retrieved the content from the Google cache and posted it here for perservation. Update: Original site is up again.

ScrumTisch Berlin - November

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:03:26 +0100

ScrumTisch Berlin - November # This evening Marion organised another successful Scrumtisch: Usually we either meet for timeboxed discussions on Scrum and agile development questions or a speaker is invited to present his favourite Scrum or Lean or Agile topic. Today Markus Frick gave a presentation of how Scrum was introduced at SAP, a German software company. They started implementing Scrum in a “small” team of about 60 people, organised in about six to seven teams.

First Apache Dinner Berlin

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:33:44 +0100

First Apache Dinner Berlin # A few days ago, I received a mail from Torsten Curdt that read something like: “[…] For a long time now I wanted to organise an Apache Dinner Berlin. What do you think, when would be a good time for that?”. As that was about the third time I heard of that idea (and the third person mentioning the idea), I included some Berlin-based Apache-people asking whether they would be interested in having an Apache Dinner on November 24st in X-Berg.

Moving from Fast to Solr

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:34:34 +0100

Moving from Fast to Solr # Sesat has published a nice in-depth report on why to move from Fast to Solr. The article also includes a description of the steps taken to move over as well as several statistics: http://sesat.no/moving-from-fast-to-solr-review.html On a related topic, the following article details, where Apple is using Lucene/Solr to power it’s search. Spoiler: Look at Spotlight, their desktop search, as well as on the iTunes search with about 800 QPS.

ApacheCon Oakland Roundup

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:15:23 +0100

ApacheCon Oakland Roundup # Two weeks ago ApacheCon US 2009 ended in Oakland California. Shane published a set of links to articles that contain information on what happened at Apache Con. Some of them are officially published by the Apache PRC project, others are write-ups of individuals on which talks they attended and which topics they considered particularly interesting.

Mahout 0.2 released

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:52:04 +0100

Mahout 0.2 released # Apache Mahout 0.2 has been released and is now available for public download at http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/mahout Up to date maven artifacts can be found in the Apache repository at https://repository.apache.org/cont ent/repositories/releases/org/apache/mahout/ Apache Mahout is a subproject of Apache Lucene with the goal of delivering scalable machine learning algorithm implementations under the Apache license. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Mahout is a machine learning library meant to scale: Scale in terms of community to support anyone interested in using machine learning.

Open Source Expo 09

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:17:36 +0100

Open Source Expo 09 # I spent last Sunday and the following Monday at Open Source Expo Karlsruhe - co-located with web-tech and php-conference organized by the Software-and-Support Verlag. Together with Simon Willnauer I ran the Lucene/Mahout booth at the expo. So far the conference is still very small (about 400 visitors) compared to free software community events. However the focus was set to be more on professional users, accordingly several projects showed that free software can be used successfully for various business use cases.

Apache Con US Wrap Up

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:10:51 +0100

Apache Con US Wrap Up # some weeks ago I attended ApacheConUS09 in Oakland/ California. In the mean time, videos of one of the sessions have been published online: You can find a wrap up of the most prominent topics at the conference at heise (unfortunately Germany-only). By far the largest topics at the conference: Lucene - there was a meetup with over 100 attendees as well as two main tracks with Lucene focussed talks.

December Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:01:16 +0100

December Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin # As announced at ApacheCon US, the next Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin is scheduled for December 2009. When: Wednesday December 16, 2009 at 5:00pm Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin As always there will be slots of 20min each for talks on your Hadoop topic. After each talk there will be a lot time to discuss. You can order drinks directly at the bar in the newthinking store.

Lucene Meetup Oakland

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:05:23 +0100

Lucene Meetup Oakland # Though pretty late in the evening the room is packed with some 100 people. Most of them solr or pure lucene java users. There are quite a few Lucene committers at the meetup from all over the world. Several even have heard about Mahout - some even used it :) Some introductiory questions to index sizes and query volumn: 1 Mio documents seem pretty standard for Lucene deployments - several people run 10 Mio neither.

Hadoop Get Together Berlin @ Apache Con US Barcamp

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:05:07 +0100

Hadoop Get Together Berlin @ Apache Con US Barcamp # This is my first real day at ApacheCon US 2009. I arrived yesterday afternoon, was kept awake by three Lucene committers until midnight: “Otherwise you will have a very bad jetlag”… Admittedly it did work out: I slept like a baby until about 08:00a.m. the next morning and am not that tired today. Today Hackthon, Trainings and barcamp Apache happen in parallel.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:40:06 +0100

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # Title: Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin Location: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin Mitte Link out: Click here Description: The upcoming Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin will feature four talks by people explaining how they put Hadoop to good use in their entreprise. Table at Cafe Aufsturz is booked already. Talks will be announced late next week. Start Time: 17:00 Date: 2009-12-16

Open Source Expo

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:38:12 +0100

Open Source Expo # Title: Open Source Expo Location: Karlsruhe Link out: Click here Description: There will be a booth at Open source expo introducing interested visitors to the Apache projects Lucene and Mahout. Of course we are also happy to answer any questions on the ASF in general. Start Date: 2009-11-15 End Date: 2009-11-16

Apache Con US - Program up

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:35:43 +0100

Apache Con US - Program up # The final program is available for download over at http://us.apachecon.com. The schedule is packed with interesting talks on Hadoop, Lucene, Tomcat, httpd, web services, osgi. For those less tech-savvy there is a business track explaining how to best use open source software in an entreprise environment. There is also a community track explaining what makes open source projects successful. Looking forward to seeing you in Oakland.

Lucene 2.9 White Paper

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:51:32 +0100

Lucene 2.9 White Paper # Lucid recently published a white paper that explains the changes and improvements that the new 2.9 release incorporates. Interesting for all who are thinking about upgrading to the new lucene version or generally want to know what is going on at Lucene.

NoSQL Berlin Meetup

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:24:26 +0200

NoSQL Berlin Meetup # Yesterday evening the NoSQL Berlin Meetup took place in newthinking store, Berlin Mitte. We had planned for some 50 to 70 people. It quickly became clear that the room would be full - at startup I counted about 80 guests interested in NoSQL topics both locally from Berlin but also traveling here from New York. Some pictures are available on flickr - thanks to @langalex for sending the url to me:

Videos are up

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:31:39 +0200

Videos are up # As of yesterday the videos of the last Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin are available online. Th anks to the speakers for providing insight in their projects and thanks to Cloudera for sponsoring the videos. The next meetup will be announced soon - three talks have already been proposed. In addition, StudiVZ offered to sponsor video taping of the next Get Together. Looking forward to seeing you in Berlin in December.

Scrumtisch with Mary and Tom Poppendiek

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:07:45 +0200

Scrumtisch with Mary and Tom Poppendiek # Yesterday evening the Scrumtisch Berlin hosted a talk by Mary Poppendiek on Lean Development. Mary started the session with a talk on what lean development is all about and why it goes further than Scrum ever did. Some of the core principles she explained: The first goal of every lean project should be to strive for customer satisfaction. The low hanging fruit is to do exactly what the customer wanted to have.

katta @ Berlin

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:46:35 +0200

katta @ Berlin # After finishing the slides for next week’s Mahout course at TU Berlin (if you are not subscribed yet: Subscribe now!) I spent half of the day in Tierpark Berlin: Watching ice-bears, taking pictures of tigers. On my way through the park I met those cute little guys: The plate next to the bawn gave them away as … kattas - so that is what they look like!

Lucene 2.9 @ Heise

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:13:12 +0200

Lucene 2.9 @ Heise # After last week’s Hadoop Get Together heise published an in-depth article on the changes and improvements that come with the latest Lucene 2.9 release. Thanks to Simon Willnauer for helping me write this article and patiently explaining several new features. Thanks also to Uwe Schindler for kindly proof-reading the article before it was sent out to Heise.

Scrum Day Düsseldorf

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:24:39 +0200

Scrum Day Düsseldorf # On 01. to 02. December the Scrum Day is going to take place in Düsseldorf. If you are working in a non-Scrum company and would like to use agile methods both for development and management, I would like to recommend going to the talk by Thilo Fromm: Scrum in a waterfall. He explains how he transformed his project to an agile way in a waterfall environment.

Getting Hadoop trunk up and running from source

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:18:27 +0200

Getting Hadoop trunk up and running from source # Having told Thilo about the possibility to write Hadoop jobs in Python with Dumbo, we spent some time getting Dumbo 0.21 up and running over the past weekend. The first option the wiki proposes is to take a pre-0.21 release and patch that to work with the current Dumbo release. The second option described takes the not-yet-released version of Hadoop that can be used w/o any patches.

Dev House Berlin 2.0

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:04:55 +0200

Dev House Berlin 2.0 # This weekend DevHouseBerlin took place in the Box119, kindly organized by Jan Lehnardt, sponsored by Upstream and StudiVZ. There were about 30 people gathered in Friedrichshain, hacking and discussing various projects: Mostly Python/ Django, Ruby/ Rails and Erlang people. The first day was reserved for hacking and exchanging ideas. Late afternoon attendees put together a list of talks that were than rated, ranked with the top three chosen for presentation on Sunday.

One year coding with "Das Keyboard"

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:47:35 +0200

One year coding with “Das Keyboard” # Little more than a year ago, I got myself a keyboard from newthinking store. The special thing about it: It is completely black, except for three blue LEDs. With completely I mean no labels on any key: My main motivation to buy the thing was not the missing labels (although that certainly does make it a cool gadget). I am typing 8h at work and do spend quite a bit of time in front of my laptop after work as well.

Slides are up

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:02:43 +0200

Slides are up # The slides for yesterday’s talks just arrived. They are available online at: Isabel Drost: Brief introduction. Thorsten Schuett: Solving puzzles with map reduce. Thilo Goetz: An introduction to jaql. Uwe Schindler: Lucene 2.9 developments. Videos will be online early next week.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:38:34 +0200

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # The Get Together started just a few minutes ago. The room is packed with more than 35 people this time. This is the first Hadoop Get Together in Berlin that will be recorded on video, thanks to Martin from newthinking for doing the recording and post processing as well as to Cloudera for sponsoring the videos. The first talk was given by Thorsten Schuett on solving puzzles with map reduce.

AWS User Group Berlin

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:06:17 +0200

AWS User Group Berlin # On Monday the first AWS user group took place in newthinking store, Berlin. The event featured talks by Martin Buhr from Amazon as well as presentations of AWS users like Dawanda, Peritor and Sound Cloud. Unfortunately the most interesting question concerning Elastic Map Reduce was left unanswered by Martin: Does using EMR facilitate exploiting data locality/ rack locality optimizations that are possible in Hadoop? The question on whether Amazon is using the AWS APIs internally as well was answered positively, though of course they did not publish all of their systems infractructure.

Looking for a dancing school in Berlin

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:23:28 +0200

Looking for a dancing school in Berlin # I am looking for a dancing school (standard as well as Salsa Cubana) in Berlin Schöneberg. So in case you have any recommendations - please leave a comment.

Upcoming: Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:00:52 +0200

Upcoming: Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # This is a friendly reminder that the next Apache Hadoop Get Together takes place next week on Tuesday, 29th of September* at newthinking store (Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin). Thorsten Schuett, Solving Puzzles with MapReduce. Thilo Götz, Text analytics on jaql. Uwe Schindler, Lucene 2.9 Developments. Big thanks goes to newthinking store for providing the venue for free and to Cloudera for sponsoring videos of the talks.

Scrum Tisch

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:30:17 +0200

Scrum Tisch # Title: Scrum Tisch Description: The Scrumtisch on October 11th will feature a talk by Mary Poppendieck. She will join that extraordinary Scrumtisch at 6pm. The location is not yet defined yet, because Marion first needs to know how many of are coming. Start Time: 18:00 Date: 2009-10-11

Scrum Tisch

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:01:38 +0200

Scrum Tisch # Title: Scrum Tisch Location: La Vecchia Trattoria Description: The next Scrum Tisch organized by Marion Eickmann takes place this Thursday. Since a pretty long time the format will be open for questions, prioritized by the participants again. The location is in Niederbarnimstraße 25, near U-Bahn Samariterstrasse. Start Time: 18:30 Date: 2009-09-24

Mahout@TU WS 09/10

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:08:23 +0200

Mahout@TU WS 09/10 # Title: Mahout@TU WS 09/10 There is going to be a project/seminar course at TU Berlin on Apache Mahout. The goal is to introduce students to the work on a free software project, interact with the community and build production ready software. Students will be given several potential tasks ranging from optimizing existing implementations, implementing new algorithms and (depending on their prior knowledge) improving, scaling and parallelizing existing algorithms.

GSoC at Mahout

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:22:02 +0200

GSoC at Mahout # GSoC 2009 is about to finish: Final evaluations are through, most of the code submitted by Mahout’s students has been committed to svn, code samples are on their way to Google. In Mahout, we had three students joining the project: Robin working on an HBase based Naive Bayes extension and on frequent itemset discovery. David contributing a distributed LDA implementation. Deneche was working on a Random Forest implementation.

First NoSQL Meetup in Germany

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:58:50 +0200

First NoSQL Meetup in Germany # On October 22nd 2009 the first NoSQL Meetup Germany is going to take place in newthinking store/ Berlin: http://nosqlberlin.de Please submit your presentation proposals until September 22nd, accepted speakers will be notified soon after. If you would like to sponsor the event, feel free to contact us: We would be very happy to provide videos after the event and free drinks for everyone during the event.

Two days on Rügen

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:50:04 +0200

Two days on Rügen # Below: Sunday morning on Rügen, feet in the East Sea. It looks colder than it actually was: Air was about 17 °C, but the water was fine. At least for my feet. Thanks to the colleague who sold two spare tickets for the Störtebecker Festspiele last Thursday and caused us to drive to isle Rügen yesterday afternoon.

Apache Con drawing closer

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:47:14 +0200

Apache Con drawing closer # By November I will be traveling to Oakland - for me it is the first Apache Con US ever. And the first Apache Con I will be giving a talk in one of the main tracks: I will be presenting Apache Mahout, give an overview of the project, of our current status and explain which problems can be solved with the current implementation. The talks will conclude with an outlook to upcoming tasks and features our users can expect in the near future.

gnuplot tutorial link

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:30:41 +0200

gnuplot tutorial link # As I am happily watching myself searching for the gnuplot tutorial over and over again - the direct link stored here to save future searching: http://t16web.lanl.gov/Kawano/gnuplot/index-e.html

Inglourious Basterds

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:48:13 +0200

Inglourious Basterds # This evening I went to the cinema Odeon in Berlin Schöneberg. It is a pretty traditional, old-fashioned and very lovely cinema that has specialised on showing non-dubbed, original versions of movies. Showing the great movie Inglourious Basterds, the cinema was completely sold out today. Fortunately we were able to grab some of the last tickets. Just in case the entrance seemed familiar to those who have attended a Mahout presentation in the recent past - a picture of the Odeon usually visualises one part of my motivation on the Mahout slides ;)

Apache Hadoop Event Blog

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:38:40 +0200

Apache Hadoop Event Blog # As Apache Hadoop becomes ever more popular both in industry as well as in research, user groups, conferences and hacking days are being scheduled around the world. The goal of the event calendar blog hosted on wordpress.com is to provide a common space for organizers to announce their events and potential participants to look for new conferences.

September Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:48:47 +0200

September Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin # The upcoming Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin is to take place on September 29th in newthinking store. Details are up on the web page at upcoming and will be sent out to the mailing list soon.

Fellow now

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:45:26 +0200

Fellow now # After two years volunteering as booth staff for the FSFE at the Chemnitzer Linuxtage explaining the advantages of becoming a FSFE fellow I am a fellow myself for two days ;) I first got in contact with the FSFE through Fernanda Weiden during my time in Zürich in 2006. In the meantime I have learned more and more about the political activities of FSFE: Mostly during the local Berlin meetups in newthinking store and as a booth member in Chemnitz.

Flying back home from Cologne

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:40:09 +0200

Flying back home from Cologne # Last weekend FrOSCon took place in Sankt Augustin, near Cologne. FrOSCon is organized on a yearly basis at the university of applied sciences in Sankt Augustin. It is a volunteer driven event with the goal of bringing developers and users of free software projects together. This year, the conference featured 5 tracks, two examples being cloud computing and the Java track. Unfortunately this year the conference started with a little surprise for me and my boyfriend: Being both speakers, we had booked a room in Hotel Regina via the conference committee.

Converting a git repo to svn

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:15:20 +0200

Converting a git repo to svn # Pretty unlikely though it may seem, but there are cases when one might want to convert a git repo to svn and still keep all revisions intact. There is a nice explanation online on how to do that in the Google Open Source blog.

September 2009 Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:11:35 +0200

September 2009 Hadoop Get Together Berlin # The newthinking store Berlin is hosting the Hadoop Get Together user group meeting. It features talks on Hadoop, Lucene, Solr, UIMA, katta, Mahout and various other projects that deal with making large amounts of data accessible and processable. The event brings together leaders from the developer and user communities. The speakers present projects that build on top of Hadoop, case studies of applications being built and deployed on Hadoop.

AMQP Erlang user group talk

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:56:38 +0200

AMQP Erlang user group talk # Last Wednesday at the Erlang user group Berlin Matthias Radestock from the RabbitMQ project gave a talk on RabbitMQ, AMQP and messaging in general. Slides are available online. First Matthias motivated the need for an open standard for messaging: So far, their are a few provides of middleware systems like Tibco and IBM. But those solutions are usually closed, expensive, cumbersome to handle. In short they do not fit into a world where people rely on open standards for communication, free software for development and lightweight implementations.

Solr at AOL

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:06:55 +0200

Solr at AOL # Grant Ingersoll has posted a very interesting interview with Ian Holsman on Solr at Relegance, now AOL. It describes the business side of the decission to switch to an open source solution, provides some inside on the size of the installation and details which technological reasons have driven the decission to switch from a proprietary implementation to Solr: http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-from-the-Experts/Podcasts-and-Videos/Interview-Ian-Holsman-Relegence</ a>

Lucene slides online

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:04:47 +0200

Lucene slides online # The slides of the Lucene talk at the last Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin are available online: Lucene Slides. Especially interesting to me are the last few slides which detail both index size and machine setup: The installation is running on two standard PCs with 2 dual-core processors (usual speed, bought in January 2008 for about 4000 Euro). They have 32GB RAM, 24 GB are used as ramdisk for the index.

Data serialization

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:39:47 +0200

Data serialization # XML, JSON and others are currently standard data exchange formats. Being human-readable but still structured enough to be easily parsable by programs is their main benefit. Problems are overhead in size and parsing time. In addition at least xml is not really as human-readable as it could be. An alternative are binary formats. Yet those often are not platform independent (either C++ or Java or Python bindings) or are not upgradable (what if your boss comes along and wants you to add yet another field?

Large Scalability - Papers and implementations

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:08:10 +0200

Large Scalability - Papers and implementations # In recent years the Googles and Amazons on this world have released papers on how to scale computing and processing to terrabytes of data. These publications have led to the implementation of various open source projects that benefit from that knowledge. However mapping the various open source projects to the original papers and assigning tasks that these projects solve is not always easy.

June 2009 Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:33:58 +0200

June 2009 Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin # Just a brief reminder: Next week on Thursday the next Apache Hadoop Get Together is scheduled to take place in Berlin. There are quite a few interesting talks scheduled: Torsten Curdt: Data Legacy - the challenges of an evolving data warehouse Christoph M. Friedrich, Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI): “SCAIView - Lucene for Life Science Knowledge Discovery”.

Scrum Table Berlin

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:26:29 +0200

Scrum Table Berlin # Last week I attended the scrum table Berlin. This time around Phillippe gave a presentation on “backlog colours”, that is types of work items tracked in the backlog. The easiest type to track are features - that is items that generate revenue and are on the wishlist of the customer. Second type of items he sees are infrastructure items - that is, things needed to implement several features but invisible to the customer.

Open Street Map @ FSFE meetup

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:59:49 +0200

Open Street Map @ FSFE meetup # At the last meeting of the local FSFE group here in Berlin Sabine Stengel from cartogis gave a presentation on Open Street Map. But instead of focussing on the technical side she described the legal issues and showed the broad variety of commercial projects that are possible with this type of mapping information. It was interesting to learn of how detailed and high quality the information provided by volunteers really is.

Keeping changesets small

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:48:19 +0200

Keeping changesets small # One trick of successful and efficient software development is tracking changes in the sources in source code management systems, be it centralized systems like svn or perforce or decentralized systems like git or mercurial. I started working with svn while working on my Diploma thesis project in 2003, continued to use this systems while researcher at HU Berlin. Today I am using svn at work as well as for Apache projects and have come to like git for personal sandboxes.

Scrum Tisch

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:27:12 +0200

Scrum Tisch # Title: Scrum Tisch Location: Divino FHain Link out: Click here Description: Philippe will present his speech from the Orlando scrum Gathering where he will speak about backlog and time-box, about value versus cost, about visible features versus invisible features (and in particular software architecture), about defects and technical debt, and more generally about release planning and sprint planning for non-trivial and long-lived software development projects. Start Time: 18:00

Ken Schwaber in Berlin XBerg

Sun, 24 May 2009 18:56:15 +0200

Ken Schwaber in Berlin XBerg # Last week I attended a discussion meetup with Ken Schwaber in Berlin/ Kreuzberg. The event was scheduled pretty shortly still quite a few developers and project managers from various companies in Berlin showed up. Ken started with a brief summary of the history of Scrum: Before there was such a thing as an IT industry programming actually was a lot of fun. But somehow the creative job was turned into something people tend to suffer from pretty quickly as people tried to apply principles from manufacturing industries to software “production”.

Open Source Development is good for you

Thu, 21 May 2009 09:08:14 +0200

Open Source Development is good for you # GSoC (Google summer of code) - one of the open source programs of Google - has started again in 2009. Students come to work for open source projects during the summer and on success are paid by Google a fair amount of money. This program is an ideal oportunity for students to get into open source projects: You get a mentor, you have pre-defined task to work on with a goal you set yourself.

Tomcat Tuesday talk

Thu, 21 May 2009 09:07:43 +0200

Tomcat Tuesday talk # Since several months at neofonie we have a talk given by external or internal developers on various subjects each Tuesday. Usually these presentations are a nice way to get an overview of new emerging technologies, to get an overview of current conference topics or to gain insight into interesting internal projects. This week we had Apache Tomcat Committer and PMC Peter Rossbach here at neofonie to talk about the Tomcat architecture and Tomcat clustering solutions.

Back from Zürich

Tue, 05 May 2009 16:58:42 +0200

Back from Zürich # I spend the last five days in Zurich. I wanted to visit the city again - and still owed one of my friends there a visit. I am really happy the weather was quite nice over the weekend. That way I could spend quite some time in town (got another one of those puzzles) and go for a hike on the Ütli mountain: I took the steep way up that had quite a lot of stairs.

DIMA @ TU Berlin

Sun, 03 May 2009 07:26:07 +0200

DIMA @ TU Berlin # On Friday, the 24th of April Prof. Volker Markl organised a Welcome Workshop at TU Berlin. The day started with an introduction by the Dekan of the faculty. First talk was given by Rudolf Bayer on the topic “From B-Trees to UB-Trees”. Second presentation was by Guy Lohman on “LEO, DB2’s Learning Optimizer”. After the coffee break, Volker Markl gave an introduction to his selected research field, outstanding tasks and the way he is going to accomplish his goals.

Scrum Table with Thoralf Klatt

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:19:14 +0200

Scrum Table with Thoralf Klatt # On Wednesday, the 22nd of April, about 20 people interested in Scrum gathered in the DiVino in Friedrichshain/Berlin. The event was split in two parts: In the first half we gathered topics participants were interested in, put priorities next the them and discussed the most highly ranked topic: “Scrum in large teams, splitting large tasks across teams." The basic take home messages of the discussion:

Feedback from the Hadoop User Group UK

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:54:54 +0200

Feedback from the Hadoop User Group UK # A few weeks after the Hadoop User Group UK is over, there are quite a few postings on the event online. I will try to keep this page updated if there are any further reviews. The one I found so far: http://huguk.org/2009/04/huguk-2-wrap-up.html - the wrap-up of the event itself. http://blog.oskarsson.nu/2009_04_01_archive.html - a short summary by the organiser - Thanks again for a great event.

June 2009 Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:30:19 +0200

June 2009 Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin # Title: Apache Hadoop Get Together @ Berlin Location: newthinking store Berlin Mitte Link out: Click here Description: I just announced the fifth Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin at the newthinking store. Torsten Curdt offered to give a talk on data serialization with Thrift and Protocol Buffers. If you have a topic you would like to talk about: Feel free to just bring your slides - there will be a beamer and lots of people interested in scalable information retrieval.

Mahout on EC2

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:00:46 +0200

Mahout on EC2 # Amazon released Elastic Map Reduce only a few weeks ago. EMR is based on a hosted Hadoop environment and offers machines to run map reduce jobs against data in S3 on demand. Last week Stephen Green has spent quite some effort to get Mahout running on EMR. Thanks to his work Mahout is running on EMR since last Thursday night. Read the weblog of Tim Bass for further information.

Hadoop User Group UK

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:34:15 +0200

Hadoop User Group UK # On Tuesday the 14th the second Hadoop User Group UK took place in London. This time venue and pizza was sponsored by Sun. The room quickly filled http://www.thecepblog.com/2009/04/19/kmeans-clustering-now-running-on-elastic-mapreduce/with approximately 70 people. Tom opened the session with a talk on 10 practical tips on how to get the most benefit from Apache Hadoop. The first question users should ask themselves is which type of programming language they want to use.

Announcing Apache Mahout 0.1

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:11:56 +0200

Announcing Apache Mahout 0.1 # This morning I received Grant’s release mail of Apache Mahout. I am really happy that after little more than one year we now have our first release out there to test and scrutinate by anyone interested in the project. Thanks to all the committers who have helped make this possible. A special thanks to Grant Ingersoll for putting so much time into getting many release issues out of the way as well as to those who reviewed the release candidates and all the major and minor problems.

GSoC: Student applications.

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:57:57 +0200

GSoC: Student applications. # Title: GSoC: Student applications closed Link out: Click here Description: After this date no more student applications are accepted. Internal ranking at Apache starts 7 days earlier. The ranking process finishes at 16th of April. Date: 2009-04-03

Students begin coding for their GSoC projects

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:54:44 +0200

Students begin coding for their GSoC projects # Title: Students begin coding for their GSoC projects Link out: Click here Description: GSoC time. Date: 2009-05-26

Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 3

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:56:44 +0200

Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 3 # Friday was the last conference day. I enjoyed the Apache pioneers panel with a brief history of the Apache Software Foundation as well as lots of stories on how people first got in contact with the ASF. After lunch I went to the testing and cloud session. I enjoyed the talk on continuum and its uses by Wendy Smoak. She gave a basic overview of why one would want a CI system and provided a brief introduction to continuum.

Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 2

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:42:20 +0200

Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 2 # Thursday morning started with an interesting talk on open source collaboration tools and how they can help resolving some collaboration overhead on commercial software projects. Four goals can be reached with the help of the right tools: Sharing the project vision, tracking the current status of the project, finding places to help the project and documenting the project history as well as the reasons for decisions along the way.

Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 1

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:41:17 +0200

Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 1 # The past week members, committers and users of Apache software projects gathered in Amsterdam for another Apache Con EU and to celebrate the 10th birthday of the ASF. One week dedicated to the development and use of Free Software and the Apache Way. Monday was BarCamp day for me, the first BarCamp I ever attended. Unfortunately not all participants proposed talks. So some of the atmosphere of an unconference was missing.

Cloud Camp Berlin

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:29:47 +0100

Cloud Camp Berlin # Title: Cloud Camp Berlin Link out: Click here Date: 2009-04-30

FSFE booth at the Chemnitzer Linux Tage

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:30:39 +0100

FSFE booth at the Chemnitzer Linux Tage # This year for the 11th time the “Linux Tage” were organized at the university of Chemnitz. Each year in March this means two days devoted to the topic of open and free software. It means an event that is very well organized by a pretty professional team of volunteers. For the third time the FSFE had its booth at the event - this time run by Rainer Kersten, Uwe Zemisch and me.

Books I found particularly helpful

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:44:44 +0100

Books I found particularly helpful # During the last few years I have quite a few books that one could easily file under the category “Hacking books”. Some of them were particularly interesting to me and have influenced the way I write code. The following list certainly is not complete at all - but it is a nice starting point. Effective C++ - I have comparably little experience with C++ but this book really helped understand some of the particularities.

Scrum Roundtable Berlin

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:51:23 +0100

Scrum Roundtable Berlin # Title: Scrum Roundtable Berlin Location: DiVino Restaurant, Grünberger Str. 69, Friedrichshain Link out: Click here Start Time: 18:00 Date: 2009-04-22 The next Scrum Roundtable is scheduled already. Thoralf, will present his speech from the Orlando ScrumGathering Agile Creation of Multi-Product Solutions Motivation for Network Solutions and their Agilility Scaling Single Product Creation Product Solutions using Scrum Customizing Projects Outlook Please let Marion know if you are coming to be able to organise the space.

Erlang User Group - Scala

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:25:32 +0100

Erlang User Group - Scala # What: Scala Presentation by Stefan Plantikow. Where: Cockpit of the Box119 http://boxhagener119.de/ (Ring at UPSTREAM) When: Wednesday, 11.03.2009, 8:00 p.m. Yesterday the Erlounge, organised by Jan Lehnardt, took place in the Cockpit of Box119 in Berlin. Topic of the evening was an introduction to Scala. Scala is a functional language that compiles to Java Bytecode and runs on the JVM. It tries to combine the best from two worlds: Object oriented languages and functional programming.

Basic statistics of a set of values

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:21:51 +0100

Basic statistics of a set of values # Just in order to find that when searching for it yet another time: Problem: You have a set of values (for instance time it took to process various queries). You want a quick overview of how the values are distributed. Solution: Store the values in a file separated by newline, read the file with R and output summary statistics. R: times <- scan(“times”, list(0))

Scrum @ Home

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:12:28 +0100

Scrum @ Home # Scrum has proven to be a suitable toolset for managing software projects: Large, unmanageable tasks are broken up into little pieces that can be easily estimated in terms of complexity or time necessary for implementation. During a fixed amount of time, several of these tasks are implemented. By looking back at previous iterations it is simple to predict exactly how many items can be expected to be ready after the next iteration.

Hadoop User Group UK

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:10:22 +0100

Hadoop User Group UK # 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”

FSFE Meetup Berlin

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:07:19 +0100

FSFE Meetup Berlin # 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.

Scrum discussions in Berlin

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:11:03 +0100

Scrum discussions in Berlin # 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.

March 2009 Hadoop Get Together Berlin

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:50:34 +0100

March 2009 Hadoop Get Together Berlin # 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.

About

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:55:20 +0100

About # This is the blog of Isabel. I am committer at Apache Mahout. In my free time I am working on Apache Mahout, organising the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin and speaking at various conferences explaining the ins and outs of Hadoop in general and Mahout in particular. Disclaimer: I am writing this blog with my “Apache hat” on my head. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.

About

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:55:07 +0100

About this blog # This is the blog of Isabel. I’m a member of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of Apache Mahout and mentored several incubating projects. I’m interested in all things FOSS, search and text mining with a decent machine learning background. True to the nature of people living in Berlin I love having friends here for a brief visit - as a result I co-founded and am still one of the creative heads behind Berlin Buzzwords, a tech conference on all things search, scale and storage as well as FOSS Backstage.