Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The first Houston Hadoop Meetup

It was definitely a success, all due to the wonderful and colorful people who came.

Nick Popov described how using a super-size database like HBase could have helped his previous company, a mortgage conglomerate, that needed to process thousands of events per second - not foreclosures:) as one of those present suggested, but all sorts of event.

Edward Wiener wanted to know what Hadoop and BigData is all about.

Helen Jiang sees definite opportunities for BigData at her current company, Structure Group, and is looking for ways to deepen her knowledge and also to introduce those ideas to the management.

Hal Martin came all the way from Clear Lake, and found that Montrose Library is a good compromise location for everybody. He is an experienced software contractor, and wants to expand his horizons.

Ron Chichester's appearance was a pleasant and welcome surprise: Ron is a lawyer, a legal expert, a forensics expert, an open source expert, and a software expert. Oof! Ron's opinions on politics and education (he also teaches law at the UH) were so fascinating that the group kept asking him and listening when we were forced out of the meeting room by the next group - for another half hour.

Pat Kerr is a pleasant and overall good fellow, and he will go anywhere where his friends' interests are.

The remaining members of the group - we missed you and hope to see you next time.

Oh, and what was the meeting about? We discussed what BigData is - each guest giving his or her example, how Hadoop and his friends can help, and were entertained by some anecdotal evidence about the BigData explosion.

Art: Waltner Charles Albert - The Pickwick Club

2 comments:

Nick Popov said...

Excelent meeting. Thanks for organizing that Mark!
-Nick

Mark Kerzner said...

Thank you for coming and bringing your involved problem, Nick. Hope you have found the solution.

-Mark