Recent Tech Event Reviews

Last Tuesday was the monthly Hadoop meetup[1], nearby at Mahalo.

This event was a beginner friendly event, walking through getting started with hadoop on EC2. There were 20+ people and the speaker did a great job of sharing his knowledge. He or the facilitator could have done a better job cutting off rambling or unrelated questions. Jonathan and I both attended.

Nov 14-15, barcampla[2]

Postponed. BarcampLa is going back to a once-a-year from twice-a-year.

Wed 11/11, Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers[3], at ValueClick up in Westlake.

Discussion format on perl for systems administration. A wide ranging topic that was more on the basic comparisons of compiled vs interpreted languages, why ruby and python are gaining in visibility in the SysAd world and related items.

Wed 11/04, Los Angeles Perl Mongers[4], here at the Rubicon Project.

Delayed by a week due to illness. Tommy Stanton did a great presentation on Test Driven Development, using Test::Class, Test::More and Test::Most. After his presentation we had a round table discussion and some eXtreme Pair Programming as 10 of us "helped" him write code on the big screen.

Mon 10/27 was SpeedGeeks LA[5], hosted just down Olympic at ShopZilla.

I attended the keynote before work and caught the speed round during lunch. Mike D arrived after his flight and caught from 11am through the speed round. Steve Souders (of O'Reilly's Velocity conference) co-hosted and did a great job setting the keynote. The premise was that more and more with modern sites the optimization needs to come through the UI layer as the back end is already been squeezed pretty tight. His blog should eventually have slides, here's his recap [6].

Thu 10/15 Mindshare Masquerade. [7]

Did not attend, release issues.

Tue 10/13 Hadoop meetup. [1]

Hadoop Desktop overview from henry@Cloudera. A nice talk that got more technical than was probably appropriate (but in a fun way). It rained that night, delaying the presenters flight by 4 hours and the presentation by 70 minutes, so there was a thin crowd. Jonathan and I both attended, I don't know that we got much out of this one. But it sets the stage for when we come back to ask questions.

Links

1. http://www.meetup.com/hadoopla/
2. http://barcampla.org
3. http://thousand-oaks-perl.org
4. http://la.pm.org
5. http://tech.shopzilla.com/speedgeeks/
6. http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/10/27/speedgeeks-la-at-shopzilla/