Guest
on 4 September 2016
This quarter’s PLUG (Pentaho London User Group) headed to Canonical’s head office which is nicely located just behind the Tate Modern in London. I must admit I don’t know much about what they do, but a bit of research later and I quickly saw they’re at the heart of open source, and they have a truly impressive culture centering around community. Anyway – we’re always grateful for a venue, and doubly so when they provide beer!
We started off with our talk from Tom Barber showing how easy and quick it is to get started with Juju. I guess Juju is like Docker on steroids. I particularly liked the way you could simulate you’re entire cluster (networking and all) on one box (laptop!). This feature is especially interesting to the tester in me. We also had an interesting discussion about how you’d go about hooking jobs into the existing monitoring API. The slides from Tom’s talk are here.
Next up was Luis from UbiquisBI showing off their statistical analysis of the World Cup stats, and trying to predict the result part way through a game. I did like the way (as you have to when the event is passed) you could easily simulate replaying from a certain date/point in time. Given the complexity of parsing some of the HTML data from wikipedia, I did wonder whether they had attempted to use HTML parsing stuff that used to be in Apache Calcite – As that allows you to present a simple wikipedia page as a SQL table – but unfortunately I cannot find that tool any more, so I guess that’s why not!
What was different this time other than the venue? Well we had a slight change in the balance of regulars vs new folk – with more new people coming – I put this down to the venue and topics.
More interestingly the vibe was pretty exciting this time. We had loads of positive feedback at the end of the event, both on meetup and face to face. I think the subjects were good, and we nailed it, well done everyone. So lets keep that going, our next meetup is likely to be one of our biggest ever, as we’re doing a tie in with the huge #bigdata London event. You can find details here. If anyone has a talk, then let me know and I’ll schedule you in.
About the author
Dan Keeley is a community driven data engineer working with a wide range of Big Data technologies. He is heavily involved in the open source community hosting several meetups and attending many others. Beyond day to day consulting work Dan fits in volunteering work and the day to day running of his own company and employees.
