September 3, 2010
Part 2: Tracking tasks, or - Where the hack did my time go to last week? # After summarising some strategies for not loosing track of tasks, meetings and conferences in the last post, this one is going to focus on the retrospect on achievements. If at some point in time you have asked yourself “Where the hack did time go to?” - maybe after two busy weeks of work this article might have a few techniques for you.
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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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March 10, 2010
Google Summer of Code starting # As published on the Google Open Source blog the application period for mentoring organizations for GSoC starts now. The ASF is already in the process of applying. If you are a student, looking for an interesting project to work on during the coming summer - you might consider participating in GSoC. It does give you are great opportunity to get in touch with successful free software projects, learn how to work in global teams, improve your communication skills and last but not least show and publish your fantastic coding skills.
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February 1, 2010
Shopping at Ikea # Some weeks ago, Thilo had a tiny little gadget not to be missed in an average geek’s appartment: A server - admittedly a little old and a bit slow, but still usable for playing around. He installed Ubuntu server on it. At the evening we got it configured to run Hadoop. Little later we found out that some friends of us probably, maybe have some usable hardware left as well - we’ll see on Monday.
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January 23, 2010
The 7 deadly sins of (Java) software developers # On Lucid Imaginations Blog Jay Hill published a great article on The seven deadly sins of solr. Basically it is a collection of his experiences “analyzing and evaluating a great many instances of Solr implementations, running in some of the largest Fortune 500 companies”. It is a collection of common mistakes, mis-configurations and pitfalls in Solr installations in production use.
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October 4, 2009
Getting Hadoop trunk up and running from source # Having told Thilo about the possibility to write Hadoop jobs in Python with Dumbo, we spent some time getting Dumbo 0.21 up and running over the past weekend. The first option the wiki proposes is to take a pre-0.21 release and patch that to work with the current Dumbo release. The second option described takes the not-yet-released version of Hadoop that can be used w/o any patches.
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October 4, 2009
Dev House Berlin 2.0 # This weekend DevHouseBerlin took place in the Box119, kindly organized by Jan Lehnardt, sponsored by Upstream and StudiVZ. There were about 30 people gathered in Friedrichshain, hacking and discussing various projects: Mostly Python/ Django, Ruby/ Rails and Erlang people. The first day was reserved for hacking and exchanging ideas. Late afternoon attendees put together a list of talks that were than rated, ranked with the top three chosen for presentation on Sunday.
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October 4, 2009
One year coding with “Das Keyboard” # Little more than a year ago, I got myself a keyboard from newthinking store. The special thing about it: It is completely black, except for three blue LEDs. With completely I mean no labels on any key:
My main motivation to buy the thing was not the missing labels (although that certainly does make it a cool gadget). I am typing 8h at work and do spend quite a bit of time in front of my laptop after work as well.
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