GoTo Con # Location: Amsterdam Link out: Click here Start Date: 2011-10-12 End Date: 2011-10-14 This week late Tuesday night I am going to leave for GoTo con in Amsterdam. Train tickets are already booked - this is going to be my first trip with City Night line, will see how great they are. GoTo Amsterdam features a special Apache track as well as several talk on scaling up, searching, but also includes stuff in general architectural decisions. ...
Apache Mahout Meetup Amsterdam # Last week I was honoured to be invited as one of the two speakers on Apache Mahout at the Mahout meetup in Amsterdam at JTeams offices. After free beer, cola and pizza Frank Scholten gave an overview of Mahout's clustering capabilities. After a brief introduction to Mahout itself he went into a little more detail on how clustering works in general. After that with a selection of Seinfeld scripts he used a fun data set to guide the audience through the process of choosing the right data preparation steps, coming up with good training parameters and finally evaluating clustering quality. ...
FOSDEM - Sunday - smaller bits and pieces # With WebODF the Office track featured a very interesting project that focusses on providing a means to open ODF documents in your favourite browser: Content and formatting are converted to a form that can easily be dealt with by using a combination of HTML and CSS. Advanced editing is then supported by using JavaScript. With Open Stack the following talk focussed on an open cloud stack project that was started by NASA and Rackspace as both simultanously needed support for an open source, openly designed, developed cloud stack that strives for community inclusion. ...
FOSDEM - HBase at Facebook Messaging # Nicolas Spiegelberg gave an awesome introduction not only to the architecture that powers Facebook messaging but also to the design decisions behind their use of Apache HBase as a storage backend. Disclaimer: HBase is being used for message storage, for attachements with Haystack a different backend is used. The reasons to go for HBase include its strong consistency model, support for auto failover, load balancing of shards, support for compression, atomic read-modify-write support and the inherent Map/Reduce support. ...
FOSDEM - Django # The languages/ cloud computing track on Sunday started with the good, the bad and the ugly of Django's architecture. Without much ado the speaker started by giving a high level overview of the general package layout of Django - unfortunately not going into too much detail on the architecture itself. What he loves about Django are the model layer abstractions that really are no ORM only - instead both relational and non-relational databases can be supported easily. ...
FOSDEM - Saturday # Day one at FOSDEM started with a very interesting and timely keynote by Eben Moglen: Starting with the example of Egypt he voted for de-centralized distributed and thus harder to take over communication systems. In terms of tooling we are already almost there. Most use cases like micro blogging, social networking and real time communications can already be implemented in a distributed, fail safe way. So instead of going for convenience it is time to think about digital independence from very few central providers. ...
O’Reilly Strata - day one afternoon lectures # Big data at startups - Info ChimpsAs a startup to get good people there is no other option then to grow your own: Offer the option to gain a lot of experience in return for a not so great wage. Start out with really great hires: People who have the "get shit done gene": They discover new projects, are proud to contribute to team efforts, are confident in making changes to a code base probably not known before hand. ...
O’Reilly Strata - Day two - keynotes # Day two of Strata started with a very inspiring insight from the host itself that extended the vision discussed earlier in the tutorials: It's not at all about the tools, the current data analytics value lies in the data itself and in the conclusions and actions drawn from analysing it. Bit.ly keynoteThe first key note was presented by bit.ly - for them there are four dimensions to data analytics: ...
O’Reilly Strata - Tutorial data analytics # Acting based on dataIt comes as no surprise to hear that also in the data analytics world engineers are unwilling to share details of how their analysis works with higher management - with on the other side not much interest on learning how analytics really works. This culture leads to a sort of black art, witch craft attitude to data analytics that hinders most innovation. ...
Teddy in San Francisco # Before attending O'Reilly Strata there were a few days left to adjust to the different time zone, meet up with friends and generally spend some days in the Greater San Francisco area. As was to be expected, those were way to few days. The weekend was a bit rainy, still packed with visiting China town right after the plane had landed and spending some time at . ...