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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # Title: Apache Dinner Berlin Location: Good Morning Vietnam X-Berg<br />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 # 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 # 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. ...