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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # “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 # 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 # 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”. ...