December 5, 2010
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).
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December 5, 2010
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.
December 4, 2010
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.
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December 3, 2010
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.
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December 2, 2010
Teddy in Amsterdam Schiphol # Caught Teddy just before the plane took off:
December 1, 2010
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.
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November 30, 2010
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.
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November 29, 2010
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.
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November 29, 2010
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.
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November 28, 2010
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.
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