The fine folks at Continuum Analytics have launched a series of online Python and PyData courses. They currently have three course offerings:
1) Practical Python Programming
2) Python for Finance
3) Python for Science.

Those of you who know Peter and Travis know that they have a strong commitment to education and community. It's reflected in the quality of these courses.

For additional details on the courses and a discount code, check out the link.
http://bit.ly/virtual-python

-Lynn

I am a huge fan of the Aurelius Graph Cluster and had to share this.

I had lunch yesterday with Matthias Bröcheler, dev lead for the Titan graph database and CTO of of Aurelius, who recently spoke at Data Day Texas. He told me that he and Marko Rodriguez, Founder of Aurelius, are looking for a Hadoop expert with an interest in graphs to join the Aurelius team.

Aurelius is looking for someone who can assist with customer deployments as well as advise on existing tools and help create new ones.

One of the tools that Aurelius created is Faunus, a graph analytics engine that runs on top of Hadoop. Faunus takes a graph query and compiles a set of MapReduce steps.

The ideal candidate will be someone who has used Hadoop and Hbase in a production system of a significant size; someone who can open an SSH shell, look at the tools, and know what config changes to optimize a Hadoop installation for tools like Faunus; and someone who can quickly get a feel for what Aurelius MapReduce jobs should look like, then codify that knowledge and provide formulas for computation.

Aurelius is looking for someone who can become a regular full-time member of their staff (with benefits). However, they don’t mind transitioning someone who would like to join them but is currently in the middle of a project.

Matthias makes a great case for joining their team:
Graph Theory and Network science is a world of its own. It’s wildly fascinating and most of the interesting challenging problems of the 21st century are going touch on network science in some way, shape or form. A person who is interested in network science is going to learn more working with us than doing anything else.

Interested? Send a resume with cover letter to Aurelius at:
job-hadoop@thinkaurelius.com

Tickets are still available for Data Day Texas.

Several years back Meghan Gill at 10gen started hosting MongoDB office hours. Essentially, 10gen would send a few engineers to a local coffee house for a few hours, and people could come in and ask questions. Not quite free consulting, but a great way to help people determine the suitability of MongoDB for a project -- or get some informal help with architecting a solution.

I thought that this was such a great idea that I decided to steal it for the first NYC Cassandra Summit. During the conference, we opened up a room called Meet the Experts, and staffed it with Cassandra engineers. At points throughout the afternoon, practically 25% of the roughly 200 attendees were in the Meet the Experts room. I have made a point to provide such a space at events wherever possible. Data Day Texas will be no exception.

During Data Day Texas, a handful of technologists from various companies will be holding office hours. In quite a few of the cases, the co-founder or other c-level individual will be the one hosting the office hours. This is your opportunity to discuss their products and technology, determine suitability for specify projects, etc. tell them that you like them/don't like them -- be nice.

Below are some of the companies who will be holding office hours at Data Day Texas.

Aerospike
Aurelius
Basho
Concurrent
Continuum Analytics
Heroku
Tableau

Tickets are still available for Data Day Texas. A few sponsorship opportunities are available as well. Questions? Send me a note at data@lynnbender.com

-Lynn

Register for Data Day Texas at:
http://data-day-texas-2013.eventbrite.com/

As part of the speaker selection process for Data Day Texas, we've been asking all the folks we know in the Austin data community what and who they would like to see. Below are some of the responses we've received so far.

Responses for December 18-19

My primary interest is machine learning. I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people doing things the like kaggle competitions. A workshop where we actually tackled one of the problems like that would be great fun.

#####

We use most of the Hadoop eco-system including Hbase, Flume, Hive etc… I’d like to see hands-on tutorials or demos on Hadoop, Hbase and related software.

#####

What about talks on storm? stream processing? I want to play with those but haven't had time to really dive into them.

#####

What about giraph for graphs?

#####

I'm interested in high volume streaming data capture, storage, and analytics. Basically high end log capture and analysis. How to capture in real time, get it accessible quickly, and then do analysis and visualization on huge amounts of stored data. That's what I'm into right now, but I know there's something to learn from the experts on this.

#####

HBase is an extremely popular technology. HBase vs. Cassandra, would actually make a great topic for the Austin Data Party smackdown. For data day, the schema modeling is not all that different from Cassandra, so it would probably be better to do a NoSQL Schema modeling panel where Cassandra, NoSQL and Mongo are all represented. As a seperate talk, I think you'd want to focus on someone who can talk about implementation, configuration and navigating around steady-state surprises －－the issues that tend to pop up when you've actually deployed applications using the technology and are running those applications in production. This is something that also is not broadly known, regardless of which particular Big Data technology it is.

#####

Strata (and others like it) tend to focus on data and the "enterprise" whereas I think Data Day should be more about 2 sort-of tent poles: (1) interesting data use cases and (2) applied solutions to data problems.

More specifically, topics for (1) could be things that focus on
interesting data sets and tools that can be used to surface non-obvious indicators
"getting started with data analysis" approaches
how to unearth information from typical data that organizations collect (e.g. log data, etc.)

For (2) I see this more as what tools companies/individuals are using to solve data problems:
management tools to deploy data infrastructure
pipeline management for end to end data analysis (not just Map Reduce but getting your data from your apps all the way to getting useful results)
new software that solves existing data-centric pain points
new tools to work with the big data stack (things like eclipse plug-ins to work with Elastic Map Reduce, etc.)

#####

I would love to hear some talks about business intelligence. Anything relating to tools, frameworks, packages, etc.
My favorite talks are when a presenter just runs through a problem and the problems / successes they encountered along the way.

#####

I believe HBase and Hadoop are both of major interest. A tutorial of HBase could also target Hadoop considering they are co-installed and tightly coupled. The goal of working around more professional Analytics examples could enrich the event. Overall there is much focus nowadays towards Analytics, in different angles and Hadoop has become a de-facto on both core and alternative analytics.

#####

Another area of interest nowadays is "Stream Computing", which involves the avoidance of storing large amounts of data, while identifying the important data patterns that comes from data streams. This is also an interesting association to analytics and BigData. Overall I would see today the ned to not only have systems that can efficiently store and consult data, but also capture needed aspects and discard redundant ones prior to storing them.

#####

A talk by Nathan Marz would be great. I would LOVE to know more of the implementation details behind the twitter architecture - especially the use of Kafka and Voldemort in the "real time data", and the delineation of "eventual accuracy".

#####

Also, it would be awesome to have someone from Titan to talk about graph database and querying, as well as the mapping to Cassandra.

#####

Speaking of Cassandra, the DataStax integration with Solr/Lucene would be a really useful topic. I really want to understand the extend of the use of Cassandra as an index store, and conversely, how indexing of Cassandra data works.

Do you live in Texas? Planning on joining us for Data Day Texas? Let us know what you'd like to see. Send a note to me at data@lynnbender.com.

Register for Data Day Texas at:
http://data-day-texas-2013.eventbrite.com/

As you many of you know, the GeekAustin classes began in 2009 as a free community service. When Cospace opened a few years back, we made them the primary home and first choice venue for the classes. Cospace is a clean well-lit space, convenient to most everyone in the Austin area, and they were gracious hosts. Because of our partnership, the GeekAustin classes have flourished. We've been able to host dozens of classes in topics like MySQL (beginning and advanced), PHP (beginning and intermediate), Ruby on Rails, Shell scripting, Linux, deployment in the cloud, etc. We have been fortunate enough to have the top local experts in each technology lead our classes. The only problem we encountered was that the demand for classes exceed the number of available evenings at Cospace.

We were recently informed by Cospace that they are now launching their own series of tech classes. They have simultaneously increased the amount they charge us for their space by 50%. We began charging for the GeekAustin classes so that we could host them in a professional space, and pay top teachers what we thought they deserved. We have no desire to raise the costs further, pay the teachers less, or increase the number of students per class. Consequently, we find ourselves in search of new venue(s) for the GeekAustin classes.

We are looking for one or more spaces in the Downtown / North Central area. In addition to financial compensation, we can offer a variety of additional perks. If you know of any venues which you think might be suitable, please contact me directly at: classes@geekaustin.org

-
Lynn Bender
GeekAustin

Note: you must RSVP to attend this event

It began at the Afterparty
At the Afterparty for the first Data Day Austin, a *friendly* debate occurred concerning which was better: MySQL or PostgreSQL. The participants could not have been better matched:

For PostgreSQL: Jim Nasby, the highest profile and most in-demand PostgreSQL engineer in the Central Texas Area.
For MySQL: Boyd Hemphill, Chief Systems Architect at FeedMagnet, co-organizer of the MySQL Meetup and instructor for the GeekAustin SQL/MySQL classes.
The Referee: Joe Celko (wikipedia page), author of more books on SQL than I can count. I've been a huge fan of Joe's for years. I can't imagine a person better suited to referee this relational slapfest.

The Smackdown
My friend Michelle Greer curated the NoSQL Smackdown at Flip Kromer's SXSW Data Cluster party two years ago, and in doing so, started a tradition. With her blessing, GeekAustin has carried the tradition on at the Austin Data Party.

The Austin Data Party
For the Austin Data Party this year, there was no question what the Smackdown would be. I asked Boyd, Jim, and Joe, if they would get up on stage and do it again. They all said yes. Think: Relational Data Meets MMA.

MySQL vs. PostgreSQL? We'll be settling the debate for once and for all (just like vi vs. Emacs). If you want to witness this friendly debate, join us at the Austin Data Party.

The Smackdown will take place at 6:30 pm.

Details:
The MySQL vs. PostgreSQL Smackdown
at the Austin Data Party
Sunday, March 11, 6:30pm
705 Red River Street Austin, TX 78701
http://austindataparty.eventbrite.com/
Note: you must RSVP at Eventbrite to attend this event