June 17th 2013 Big Data and Development Environments

Alice spoke about how it can be slow and painful setting up development environments, and gave a brief demo of her Hadoop development environment which lets anybody deploy a virtual machine with all the necessary tools in minutes.  She spoke about how this can easily be copied for other environments using the Vagrant and Chef tools included.  Bats Bash Automated Testing System was shown which makes for nice readable tests.  Alice also showed how you can see what location history Google has noted about you, and shared some recent trips via this medium.

Discussion then veered off into big data, hadoop, map/reduce and scaling large systems.  A presentation from the NSA on their use of Hadoop for big social graphs was shown, as were images of a 33 node beowulf cluster built with Raspberry Pi. Meanwhile we noted that Obama is checking your email.

Past Meetings