7/14/10 @ 6pm Palantir’s Project Horizon: Interactive Analysis With Big Data

Project Horizon started as a hackday project at Palantir to explore what analysis is possible with Big Data. Building on Palantir’s mission of enabling analysis at a level people understand rather than constrained by nitty-gritty data-oriented interfaces, Horizon enables interactive analysis that real people can understand. Rather than “write a complicated query, run it overnight,” Horizon helps users iterate in seconds, asking new questions based on the answers they get at each step. Horizon uses a similar-but-different API to MapReduce and a highly-optimized memory datastore to deliver results in interactive time. We’ll run through examples of the kinds of analyses this enables, and discuss the NoSQL datastore we built to make it all possible.

This is a good opportunity to see what ideas are developed for big data UIs where there is an installed base of paying customers. This is a very interesting topic, the modifications they made to a basic Hadoop like map reduce data store as an answer for what customers want to pay for. Come with questions!!!

Dinner(http://bbqkalbi.com) Provided Registration required for food planning

http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/horizon

7/13/10 @7pm The State Of The Database With Tim Ellis.

Tim Ellis, Principal Data Architect at Mozilla (ex-Digg, Friendster), will present "The State of the Database": Industry-changing shifts are happening: the rise of SSDs, NoSQL/Big Data, distributed databases, and frameworks to make them. Free dinner & refreshments! Please register for food planning. The talk is sponsored by: Mixpanel, Real-time web analytics & funnel analysis, WePay, simple online payments for groups and organizations. Tim Ellis is a very very capable and highly talented database architect. If you have to use databases or clusters for internet scale data, you may want to see him talk. This is an extremely rare opportunity to see how architectures and best practices change with scale.

7/12/10 6-9pm  Force.com Developer meetup at the PayPal Headquarters, San Jose, California. This event lets you learn and explore the Force.com platform, building e-commerce apps using the PayPal X toolkit for Force.com, as well as meet our evangelists and tech experts, who will host code consultations as well as Force.com demos. We'll supply the food as well! Save your seat now!

Track 1: Intro to Force.com Workshop (Bring your laptop for the lab)
* For those new to Force.com, this track will get you up and building apps in the cloud in no time. The track first introduces you to the Force.com platform and then turns it over to you to create your first cloud app via step-by-step tutorials.

Track 2: Using the Force.com platform for e-commerce success
* Learn how to use Visualforce and Force.com Sites to create e-commerce ready websites. This session will include demonstrations of handling URL rewriting, cookies, and provide case studies of organizations using Force.com Sites to successful run their business.

* The PayPal X Toolkit for Force.com makes it easy to develop applications on Force.com that require process payments and related transactions. In this presentation we look at how PayPal makes payments easy on Force.com, and provide an introduction to the PayPal X Payments Platform, a set of Apex classes for accessing the PayPal Adaptive Platform APIs.

Agenda
6:00 PM Doors open
6:30 PM – 6:45 PM Kickoff
6:45 PM – 7:30 PM Part I
Track 1: Intro to Force.com Workshop
Tracks 2: Force.com Sites for E-Commerce
7:30 – 7:45 PM Break
7:45 PM – 8:30 PM Part II
Track 1: Force.com Hands-on Lab (bring your own laptop)
Track 2: Paypal X Toolkit for Force.com
8:30 PM – 9:15 PM Networking & Complete survey
9:15 PM – 9:30 PM Wrapup

Pictures:

http://www.meetup.com/HackerDojo-Cloud-Computing/photos/985692/

6/22/10 8:30am-10pm Cloudforce2 Salesforce.com Programming Event at SJCC (Free). Join salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, industry luminaries from CA, VMware, and BMC, and thousands of your peers to see how the next generation of cloud computing can transform your entire business. Choose from 18 targeted breakout sessions for sales, customer service, developers, IT executives, ISVs, and entrepreneurs. And test drive 50+ live demos of cutting-edge apps. Lunch is included.

Developer Agenda:
8:30 – 9:30 am – Developer Lab (Get your new Chatter Workbook and Cheat Sheet and learn how to build your Chatter app in the cloud)
10:00 - 12:00 pm - Keynote: Welcome to Cloud 2
12:00 – 6:00 pm – Developer Lab (Get your new Chatter Workbook and Cheat Sheet and learn how to build your Chatter app in the cloud)
1:30 – 5:00 pm – Breakout Sessions
5:30 pm – 10 pm – Chatter Hackathon
Please join us for a coding marathon, as we build apps that leverage salesforce.com’s hot new technology, Chatter. Bring your laptop and your ingenuity. And bring a friend if you think collaboration is the key to winning. The grand prize winner will receive a 15” MacBook Pro & a iPad 32GB. The remaining five will get an iPod Touch 32 GB! Limited SpaceAdvance Registration Required

Followup: 2 HD members were present, 1 left and did not participate in the hackathon. DC was one of the judges in the hackathon. I tried to get other members to participate in being a judge but got no responses to my email when asking for volunteers. Hackathon judging was a blast. Never thought it would be so much fun.

Rohit may be interested in setting up a meetup at the HD, he got Nick's card.

Photos:Here

Follow up with Ryan from genius.com to develop a JCP class based on the Goetz book. That would be fun. Lots of work though. There is no such thing as a concurrency class anywhere.

The prizes were incredible, a 15" macbook pro and 64Gb ipad, over 2k in prizes for first place. Salesforce.com is extremely organized, they don't do things on the cheap. Very high quality execution. Very impressive company. They are the opposite of Google in many respects. A lot of what they deliver is about the service and having the people in the ecosystem understand the concept of service. Great company.

6/17/10 7pm-9pm Amazon AWS Talk and Cloud Computing Class Amazon AWS Account Manager Alex McClure(the free Amazon codes were his idea!!!), Jinesh Varia Technical Evangelist from Amazon AWS will come to Hacker Dojo to present Amazon services. Amazon is providing free AWS credits for HD programming classes at this event. Please register in advance to doug.chang **at ** hackedojo.com so we can prepare credit codes. 100/100 signed up. Event emails sent out 10pm 6/16; if you received an email you will receive a code. If I don't have your email please send me a request at the email address above. I cannot get email addresses from the meetup.com site.

Slides are posted to the Amazon AWS Talk link above in red. 

Followup: Larry is developing a class using Amazon material he obtained from Tracy. He is in direct contact with Amazon, dc is not involved in this process. Tyler's talk was incredible, he invented a modification to k nearest neighbors making this algorithm linear vs n^2. This work is published.

Peter showed a novel way to implement windowing for summations on the Amazon cluster. Very clever work.

6/3/2010 Rasmus Lerdorf PHP inventor

Sponsored by MixedPanel and ... . This event was coordinated by Jeremy Richardson of MixPanel and Hackerdojo member John Zelling.  This was a fantastic talk, he showed how to not only profile servers but PHP code bases. Rasmus downloaded the WordPress software bundle, installed it on his netbook and proceeded to profile it showing how to analyze and improve performance. His talk shows you how to figure out how he can make statements like "Try to avoid using include_once and require_once if possible. You are much better off using a straight include or require call, because the *_once() calls are very slow under an opcode cache. Sometimes there is no way around using these calls, but recognize that each one costs you an extra open() syscall and hash look up" from his blog. The tools Rasmus shows are invaluable for any programmer, especially server side programmers.  

Summary posted by Ivan Barrios

The topic was performance optimization. It's pretty clear from his talk that Rasmus knows his stuff when it comes to performance at every level - system, network, PHP executor, etc.
A few key takeaways:

1) You have to be aware of the cost of "features" (i.e. functionality on a web page), in terms of how long it's taking to load those features.
       - As a rule-of-thumb if your pages load in less than 500ms then that's good enough. (That's the standard that Yahoo sets for itself internally) More than 1s is dismal.
2) You can't understand the performance tradeoffs of a given feature without some tools to profile and display what the application is doing.
       - A few helpful tools:
            a) YSlow - Firefox/Firebug add-on that grades (A-F) the performance of a web page your visiting. (Provides practical recommendations for improvement)
            b) PageSpeed - Google equivalent
            c) Siege - benchmark tool to measure how long it takes your server to respond to a request.
  - Key parameters to look at: "Response time" & "Transaction Rate"
            d) APC - enable APC to perform bytecode caching of your PHP and get an instant boost in performance. (Get APC from PECL)
            e) Valgrind - Rasmus' most recommended tool! He says they don't release a PHP version without it. Use Callgrind subtool to view graphical version of code execution profile. Very cool!
             f) XDebug
  Rasmus walked through a few example cases of characterizing the performance of a simple WordPress blog and a Twitter aggregator he wrote. He also demonstrated that an APC-enhanced web app (Twitter aggregator) ran faster than the same application compiled into native code by Facebook's HipHop compiler. (HipHop converts PHP into C++, then compiles it into native code to optimize for performance) He walked through all of the tools' analysis data to narrow down the reason for the HipHop version of the application being slower. (It turned out to be a single issue with time zones getting resolved on every HTTP request) Even with that fixed, performance was still at parity.
For more detail visit http://talks.php.net/show/dojo where Rasmus has posted his slides. (There's also lots of other good presentations on other topics he's got up there! By the way, Scott, Rasmus has a presentation up there on security - maybe you can "leverage" some of that content for our security discussion! see http://talks.php.net/show/flux)

5/22/10

BRV Ventures presentation. I was not at this event because the machine learning class was at the same time. BRV paid for 60 people to have dinner at the korean taco truck. This seemed to work well. As a result of this presentation and the great response at HD, we set up a structure between DC and Cheryl at BRV where they are mentoring members on how to do business plans! Try finding that type of relationship from another communal workspace.

5/13/2010

Google Go programming language with Andrew Gerrand. Web page here:

http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/HackerDojoOpenSourceProgrammingWorkshop

The goal was to get people interested in contributing libraries to Google Go. Extremely low interest from anyone.