Today I do not have very much to do at work. I am not moaning about it, I would just like to point out that my actual team has a very strict “don’t change anything that works before a holiday or the weekend”-policy, this is a very good policy, but it leads to personal downtimes on fridays and the days before holidays for obvious reasons that I like to fill with personal development. So I began learning something about screen and the modelines which are used in it. I found a comment from someone which was pointing out his zshrc which one should look up for a funcion namend “screen_title”. I immediatly searched the web for his name and zshrc, and the only thing that came up was his blog. Unfortunately I was sucked in by his latest post, pointing out a presentation on slideshare and completly forgot about my intention visiting this site. From this presentation forked some talks about databases and bigdata and complexity that I would really like to share. Let’s start at the beginning. My interest for Hadoop as a technology was mainly generated by a stong powersource, namely the catalog of videos over at Cloudera and a whitepaper by Greenplum which was pointed out by Dmitriy Ryaboy in his video about Pig at twitter.
So this is my path, how I began my addiction with the bigdata idea. I really would enjoy reading your story, if you like.
Back to the actual events, my conclusion there was this slideshow, and I like slideshows which are self explanatory and work without any speaker talking too long about what is printed in short clear words on the wall. This was one of those presentations. No death through powerpoint there, I like! But what was there, was extra information, that let me surf away to two talks on youtube by Rich Hickey, which really blew me away. A few words about Rich Hickley he is a co-author of Clojure and a phenomenal speaker and he talks about the importance of simplicity. I already really loved him after knowing only this. So without futher ado, here are the links to the two amazing talks:
also Rich, whom you really should follow on twitter, pointed out two whitepapers in the second video, which one might find interesting:
So much for my journey though the web today and at the dawn of understanding my devotion for bigdata. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Cheers,
Jan