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.
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From the NoSQL community, Peter Neubauer, Rusty Klophaus, Jan Lehnardt, Mathias Meyer, Eric Evans and many others made sure people got their fair share of NoSQL knowledge. With Aaron Kimball, Jay Booth, Doug Judd and Steve Loughran we had several Hadoop and related people at the conference.
The conference also featured two talks on Apache Mahout: An overview from Frank Scholten as well as a more in-depth talk by Sean Owen. It’s great to see the project grow - not only in terms of development community but also in terms of requests from professional Mahout users.
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In addition we had a keynote by Pieter Hintjens that concentrated on messaging in general and 0MQ in particular - a scalability topic otherwise highly underrepresented at Berlin Buzzwords.
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We got well over 300 attendees that filled Berlin Kosmos - a former cinema. Attendees were a good mixture of Apache and non-Apache people, developers and users. People used the breaks and bar tours after the event to get in touch, exchange ideas. It’s always good to see developers discuss design issues and architectural challenges.
Monday evening was reserved for local people taking out the speakers and interested attendees for Bar Tours to Friedrichshain. Those from Berlin took Berlin Buzzwords people to their favourite restaurants and bars - or to what they considered to be “typical Berlin”. Some spent evenings later that week drinking beer or Berliner Weisse.
The tour for keynote speakers Grant Ingersoll, Pieter Hintjens and friends was organised by Julia and myself. We went over to Kreuzberg - some went to famous Burgermeister for Burgers, the other half went to a nearby Indian restaurant. After that we spent the evening in Club der Visionäre - a club next to the water. Me personally I left at about midnight - several people of the Lucene community moved to the well known Fette Ecke later on.
When asking the audience about repeating the conference next year, all hands went up immediately. Beside lots of praise for the organisation, from the feedback form we put up we got some good ideas on how to improve the conference next year. I’d love to have you guys back here in 2011 - and I’d love to get even more attendees in. Was great fun having you here. Thanks for 5 great days:
Five instead of two days, because:
- Keynote
speakers got a special treatment - that is a personal city guide for the weekend before Buzzwords.
- We had the
official conference start on Sunday with a Barcamp.
- We had another Apache dinner on Wednesday with those Apache
people that live in Berlin. In addition the Aaron and Sarah joined us as they were still in town for the Apache Hadoop
trainings. Also Greg Stein had pizza and beer with us - he was in town for the svn conference at the end of the
week.
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Thanks to all who helped turn this conference into a success: Julia Gemählich for conference management, Ulf and Wetter for WiFi setup, Nils for travel management, Simon and Jan for support ranking talks and reaching out to your communities, all speakers for fantastic talks, those taking pictures of the conference and sharing them on Flickr for showing those who stayed at home how great the conference was, peoplezapping for the videos that will soon be available online, all sponsors for supporting the conference, all attendees for their participation. I’d love to have all of you (and many more) back in Berlin next year. An informal call for presentations has been set up already - submit now and be the one to set the trend instead of just following the Buzzwords!
For those who do not want to wait for another year: We will have another Apache Hadoop Get Together in September 2010 - watch this space for more information. If you’d like to give a talk their and present your Hadoop/ Solr/ Lucene etc. system - please get in touch with me.