September 23, 2010
Apprenticeship patterns (O’Reilly) # A few days ago I finished reading the book “Apprenticeship Patterns” - Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman, by
Dave Hoover, Adewale Oshineye. The book is addressed to readers who have the goal of becoming great software devleopers.
One naive question one could ask is why there is a need for such a book at all? Students are trained in computer science at university, then enter some IT departement and simply learn from their peers.
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August 17, 2010
Apache Dinner DUS # the evening after FrOSCon - that is on August 22nd 2010 at 7:30p.m. CEST - a combined “FSFE Fellowship meetup/ Apache dinner*” takes place in Tigges in Düsseldorf (Brunnenstraße 1, at Bilker S-Bahnhof). Given it doesn’t rain, we’ll be sitting outside.
Would be great to meet you there for tasty food, interesting discussions on Apache in general, as well as projects like Lucene, Hadoop or Tomcat in particular.
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August 11, 2010
Some statistics # Various research projects focus on learning more on how open source communities work:
What makes people commit themselves to such projects?
How much involvement from various companies is there?
Do people contribute during working hours or in their spare time?
Who are the most active contributors in terms of individuals and in terms of companies?
When asked to fill out surveys, especially in cases where that happens for the n-th time with n being larger than say 5, software developers usually are not very likely to fill out these questionairs.
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August 3, 2010
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.
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July 30, 2010
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.
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June 23, 2010
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”.
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June 20, 2010
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.
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June 15, 2010
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
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May 17, 2010
Getting a Ubuntu Laptop setup for my Mum # With DSL contracts getting ever cheaper in recent years in Germany – even outside larger cities – my mom decided to get a faster internet connection (compared to the former 56k modem) including a telephone landline flatrate.
As sitting in the garden while surfing the internet is way cooler than only having a dedicated computer in an office we decided to get a notebook while at it.
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March 5, 2010
Chemnitzer Linuxtage # Title: Chemnitzer Linuxtage
Location: Chemnitz
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2010-03-13
End Date: 2010-03-14
Next week the Chemnither Linuxtage take place in - well - Chemnitz. It is the second largest Linux event after Linuxtag Berlin. However only obvious for speakers and exhibitors: It is one of those events that are known for its fantastic organisation. Nearly no problems, be it WiFi, admission to the exhibitors area, food or any help in general.
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