Hi folks, I’m Greg Benson and today I wanted to tell you about a great recurring event for anyone interested in Hadoop. But first, allow me to take a moment to introduce myself. I am Director of Research at SnapLabs, the research organization of SnapLogic. I am also a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. I focus on parallel and distributed systems and have developed several distributed languages and run-time systems. I have also lead SnapLabs to identify transformational opportunities in application and data integration, resulting in breakthroughs like SnapReduce – or as we like to call it, “Hadoop for Humans.”
OK, that’s enough about me and a nice transition back to Hadoop. For those of you that don’t know, Hadoop has a great user community. In fact, there is a monthly meet-up in San Francisco.
Last Wednesday, August 10, the University of San Francisco and SnapLogic co-sponsored the monthly SF Hadoop Meetup. If you are interested in learning more about Hadoop and talking directly with Hadoop committers and Hadoop practitioners, this is a great event to attend. It is low-key and very friendly. Aaron Kimball, co-founder of Odiago, organizes the event, and he does a great job.
The meetup employees the “unconference” format in which attendees set the agenda at the beginning of the meetup. There are two 30 minute sessions, with about 5 tracks per sessions. This results in about 10 different topics to choose from. Anyone is welcome to propose a topic. For example at the July meetup hosted by CBS, I led a session talking about how different projects are using Hadoop MapReduce as a target. This led to a discussion about how Pig, Cascading, FlumeJava, Plume, and SnapReduce all use MapReduce as a target.
Topics from the Meetup on Wednesday included MapReduce internals, Avro, Dataflow approaches to MapReduce, converting from a traditional RDBMS to Hive, log processing, and several more.
It’s great to see both regular and new faces at the SF Meetup and it shows that San Francisco has a thriving community of both Hadoop developers and Hadoop users.
Check out the SF Hadoop Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/hadoopsf/