Last.fm – the Blog

At Last.fm we’re fond of elephants. A few months ago Martin and I went to a gathering of elephant enthusiasts and liked what we saw. In fact, we liked it so much that we decided to host a similar event in London. Some 50-60 herders turned up to enjoy the presentations as well as the free beer and food kindly supplied by Yahoo! and Skills Matter.

If you are wondering what on earth I’m talking about, the event was focused on Hadoop – “a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.” We use Hadoop extensively at Last.fm and, judging by the number of people who came to the event, we’re not alone.

To make sure you don’t miss the next event you can subscribe to the Hadoop User Group UK mailing list by sending an e-mail to huguk-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and then replying to the confirmation e-mail RSS feed of the HUGUK blog. You can also simulate the experience by getting a beer from your local shop and watching the videos and presentations below. Sadly you will have to talk to yourself after you’ve watched them as we won’t be there.

• Doug Cutting (Hadoop project founder, Yahoo!): Hadoop overview
• Tom White (Hadoop committer, contractor): Hadoop on Amazon S3/EC2
• Steve Loughran (Hadoop committer, HP): Deploying Hadoop with Smartfrog
• Martin, Elias and Johan (Last.fm): Hadoop @ Last fm

• Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh) – Using Nutch and Hadoop for Natural Language Processing
• Tim Sell (Last.fm) – PostgreSQL to HBase replication
• Mark Butler (HP) – Distributed Lucene
• Klaas Bosteels (Last.fm) – Dumbo: Hadoop streaming made elegant and easy

• Various participants – Hadoop Panel Discussion

A big thank you to the presenters!

My only regret is that we didn’t have time to finish all the beer, better luck next time.