Illustrated story of Houston Hadoop Meetup

 Five years ago we came up with this logo for our book, Hadoop Illuminated. The Meetup that I started in 2011 was then meeting in Houston Public Library, and numbered in the tens, with 3-5 showing up. When we wanted to do some Amazon clusters, we found out that the library blocked port 22. We started looking for other quarters.

 Time flew, Meetup grew, and we came to our first Hadoop bootcamp. We spent more money on going to Pappadeaux restaurant than than we made on the bootcamp, but fun was had by all.

Today, the meetup is close to 700, and the current event has about 70 registrants. We have two goals.

1. In 2011, Bay area Hadoop meetup had 3,000 members, and 300 would come to the Yahoo headquarters to hear about Hadoop HA. I was green with envy. Now we have a chance to growing more than they - let's try it.
2. There is still no significant Big Data in Houston. But there are real signs that this is going to change this year. You finally hear about Big Data projects in retails, energy, power, etc.

Guys, let's continue making Houston a Big Data capital. Cheers!