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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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 # 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. ...