Houston Hadoop Bootcamp was a real success

What was so amazing about our March 28-30 bootcamp? A number of things:

• We collected more than twenty students altogether (with some remotes and some rescheduling). In the place where nobody could do it (some large companies tried) - there we were able to do it! Houston is just beginning its Big Data journey, and we at Elephant Scale may well be the catalyst taking it forward.
• We managed to go through the complete training agenda: HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, theory and practice. We packaged more real experience here than regular training programs accomplish in ten days. At the end we ran a real mini-hackathon, and each of the three teams was able to complete the SmartMeters project: find smart meter data, download it, collect with Flume into HDFS, and analyze it with Hive.
• We have formed real friendships, and our team will surely continue to maintain close ties through out LinkedIn Group, Houston Big Data: share news, share leads, and perhaps even work together.  The fact that we took the whole group to lunch every day, at nearby Papasitos or Papadeaux may also have played some role :)

Of course, we have lessons to learn and things to improve, but overall it was an unbelievable experience for all, students and trainers alike. We are already thinking of the next bootcamp on May 2, and of taking Houston Hadoop Bootcamp to Chicago and to Washington, DC.

Our students are proud of their "Excellence in Hadoop" diploma by Elephant Scale, which they can substantiate with real knowledge. 

One student, Guadalupe Hernandez, had this to say, "The bootcamp delivered on all promises and more. The experience was challenging and invigorating!"

Another student, Lila Ghemri, commented: "This was a great experience and great people to learn from and work with. Thanks to all."

Student Buu Vinh said, "It was an incredible experience. Everyone was highly motivated, hard working and helpful to each other in a 3-day super charged weekend. Mark Kerzner and Manish Mehndiratta were knowledgeable and willing to deep dive into questions, or lab work and still were able to complete the entire agenda for the bootcamp. AWESOME!"

Cartoon: Is Hadoop ready for the enterprise? - Yes and no

On the one hand, you have this view: "Big Data Adoption A Big Headache For Some Companies" (thanks to my friend Jeff for pointing this out). The reservations are summarized in the cartoon: it takes highly valuable and rare skills, the overall expenses are significant, and management's expectations may be too high.

However, this quote from Mike Tuchen, chief executive of Talend, made my tweet about it quite popular.

"Once a developer learns how to work with Hadoop and (other Big Data software) then their salary doubles, so it gets to be relatively unaffordable for a smaller company," he said. "Bigger companies not only can afford that, but they also can take their time to train their existing developers, and they are willing to make that investment."

In fact, every negative on the list may be viewed as positive. For example, there is nothing wrong about high expectations, if you can deliver.

On the other hand, Forbes leaves no doubt that Hadoop is ready for the enterprise and lists five reasons why it is so: latest version is very fast, data is growing, best practices are here, many companies support it (of course Elephant Scale is one - just kidding), and there are hosts of open source developers. So stopping Hadoop is like stopping Linux.

Who is right? Both, or course, have their points.

Big Data Cartoon - Data is the New Oil

People often say that "Data is the New Oil." You have Kaggle predicting where and how you will find oil, but you also have the data as being the new gold. This is confusing enough, so we decided to just let our illustrator explain it to us - and here is the result.

Working on the first-ever Hadoop Bootcamp in Houston

Why is Houston special? There is very little of Big Data going in Houston now, and many tried but failed to have a course here. We are succeeding because we are local, and because of our ties with the Houston community.

http://elephantscale.com/bootcamp

Cartoon - Linus Torvalds and the invention of Git

Linus Torvalds is an amazing man, and without him much of Big Data development would not be where it is now. This is our artist's homage to Li
nus.