February 17, 2013
Notes on storage options - FOSDEM 05 # On MySQL
Second day at FOSDEM for me started with the MySQL dev room. One thing that made me smile was in the MySQL new features talk: The speaker announced support for “NoSQL interfaces” to MySQL. That is kind of fun in two dimensions: A) What he really means is support for the memcached interface. Given the vast number of different interfaces to databases today, announcing anything as “supports NoSQL interfaces” sounds kind of silly.
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February 1, 2013
Elastic Search meetup Berlin – January 2013 # The first meetup this year I went to started with a large bag of good news for Elastic Search users. In the offices of Sys Eleven (thanks for hosting) the meetup started at 7p.m. last Tuesday. Simon Willnauer gave an overview of what to expect of the upcoming major release of Elastic Search:
For all 0.20.x version ES features a shard allocator version that is ignorant of which index shards belong to, machine properties, usage patterns.
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December 31, 2012
Thanks for all the help # This year was a blast: It started with the ever great FOSDEM in Brussels (see you there in 2013?), an invitation to GeeCon in Poznan (if you ever get an invitation to speak there - do accept, the organisers do an amazing job at that event). In summer we had Berlin Buzzwords in Berlin for the third time with 700 attendees (to retain the community feel to the conference we decided to limit tickets in 2013, so make sure you get your’s early).
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May 23, 2012
GeeCon - failing software projects fast and rapidly # My second day started with a talk on how to fail projects fast and rapidly. There are a few tricks to do that that relate to different aspects of your project. Lets take a look at each of them in turn.
The first measures to take to fail a project are organisational really: Refer to developers as resources – that will demotivate them and express that they are replaceable instead of being valuable human beings.
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May 22, 2012
GeeCon - TDD and it’s influence on software design # The second talk I went to on the first day was on the influence of TDD on software design. Keith Braithwaite did a really great job of first introducing the concept of cyclomatic complexity and than showing at the example of Hudson as well as many other open source Java projects that the average and mean cyclomatic complexity of all those projects actually is pretty close to one and when plotted for all methods pretty much follows a power law distribution.
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May 21, 2012
GeeCon - Randomized testing # I arrived late during lunch time on Thursday for GeeCon – however just in time to listen to one of the most interesting talks when it comes to testing. Did you ever have the issue of writing code that runs well in your development environment but crashes as soon as it’s rolled out at customers only to find out that their Locale setting was causing the issues?
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February 14, 2012
Happy Valentine # Free Software developers can be very critical: Every single line of code gets scrutinized, every design is reviewed by several often opinionated people. Even the way communities are supposed to work sometimes gets restricted. Sometimes a simple Thank You can make all the difference for any contributor or committer.
FSFE proposed a really nice campaign: Celebrate the “I love Free Software” - Day on February 14th. In the hope that some of the readers of this blog actively develop or contribute to free software projects - this is a thank you for you!
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February 13, 2012
February 14th: “I love free software day” # This year FSFE is once again running their I love free software campaign on February 14th: The goal they put up is to have more love reports, hugs and Thank You messages sent out than bug reports filed against projects.
They have put online a few ideas on what to do that day. I’d like to add one additional option: If you are using any free software and you feel the urgent need to file a bug report on that day, use the opportunity to submit a patch as well: Make sure to not only describe what is going wrong but add a patch that contains a test to show the issue and a code modification that fixes the issue, is compatible with the project’s coding guidelines, doesn’t break anything else in the project.
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October 24, 2011
See you in Vancouver at Apache Con NA 2011 # Mid November Apache hosts its famous yearly conference - this time in Vancouver/Canada. They kindly accepted my presentations on Apache Mahout for intelligent data analysis (mostly focused on introducing the project to new comers and showing what happened within the project in the past year - if you have any wish concerning topics you would like to see covered in particular, please let me know) as well as a more committer focused one on Talking people into creating patches (with the goal of highlighting some of the issues new-comers to free software projects that want to contribute run into and initiating a discussion on what helps to convince them to keep up the momentum and over come and obstacles).
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September 24, 2010
Are devs contributing to OSS happier? # When talking to fellow developers or meeting with students it happens from time to time that I get the question of why on earth I spent my freetime working on an open source project? Why do I spend weekends at developers’ conferences like FOSDEM? Why do spent afternoons organising meetups? Why is it that I am reviewing and writing code after work for free?
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