Ever since the SDForum panel on emerging languages I’ve been very intrigued by the Scala programming language but have not been able to invest some time in a project to try it out. I got as far as setting up Eclipse with Scala and Lift but got no further. When I heard about the Engineer-to-Engineer Tech Talk, hosted at Redfin, about the use of Scala at Twitter, I made every effort to attend. The presentation was at Redfin on April 30, 2010  given by Alex Payne, who, at the time, was at Twitter and was one of the primary advocates of the introduction of Scala at Twitter. The talk really focused mostly on the good points of Scala and some of the reasons not to use Scala were possibly underplayed.

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A few weeks ago the San Francisco NoSQL Meetup Group held its first meeting at CBS Interactive in San Francisco with the topic of Riak at Appush presented by Dan Reverri from Appush. I had not previously heard of Riak so before attending the talk I very briefly looked up what it is. I discovered it was a key-value created by Basho and since I had been doing some reading about Redis and Voldemort that was enough information to get me interested. After the talk, thanks to Dan’s great presentation, I discovered Riak has a lot more capabilities than just a simple key-value store. More…

Several months ago I downloaded a copy of Selenium to evaluate how we could use it to improve automated acceptance or functional testing at Spoke. It was quite an useful tool but we didn’t have cycles for setting up some sort of infrastructure for running the tests. When I saw there was going to be an upcoming meetup, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to get inspired on using Selenium again and also learn what is new in the world of Selenium. On April 20, 2010 I attended the San Francisco Selenium Meetup at Sauce Labs (the folks behind Selenium) where the topic of the evening was “Testing Tools Demo Night.” The night included 4 speakers and demos and an opportunity to talk to the folks at Sauce Labs about their products. I even won 1000 minutes of Sauce OnDemand. More…

Several weeks ago, on March 31, 2010, Twitter hosted a talk about Neo4j at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. If you are not familiar with Neo4J it is a database that stores data as a graph, with nodes, relationships (edges), and attributes (of the node). As far as I could glean from the presentation the graph is directed and can be weighted as well. From my perspective there are a few aspects of Neo4J that are quite impressive. First, the simplicity of the API let’s you get up and running in very little time. Next, the performance is quite remarkable with 1M nodes with each node having 50 connections, it takes only 2 milliseconds to find out if there is a path between two randomly chosen nodes. It also allows for transactions and rollbacks. More…

The Search SIG of SDForum has a really interesting talk on March 30, 2010 about social search with the co-founder of Aardvark, Damon Horowitz. When I saw that this talk was coming up, I was immediately drawn to it for a few reasons. First, social search is a somewhat new idea, the definition of which differs depending on who you talk to or what you read. Second, I’m an active Aardvark user and I was interested in some of the inner workings of this very effective and powerful service. More…

Although I am not a Redis user, yet, I do have an interest in NOSQL (Not Only SQL) data storage and Redis has come up in readings and discussions as a very slick piece of technology. I figured that the First San Francisco Redis Meetup would be a good opportunity to find out more about Redis and how other software developers and companies have deployed it. Even though I was one of two or three who have not used Redis, this meetup met my expectations. More…

The topic for the SDForum Software Architecture & Modeling SIG meeting on March 24, 2010 was titled Building a Search Engine in the Social Media Era presented by AJ Chen, Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc. The presentation started off by reviewing some of the issues that the social media environment bring forth and then jumped into various search architectures from traditional, to real time, to social, and finally semantic. More…

The theme for the latest SDForum Cloud Services & SOA SIG meeting was increasing performance of coud computing. The talk included three presentations that went over network communications, application, and storage.  This seemed like it would be an interesting talk and my expectation was that I might learn something useful that a startup or small tech company could use. It was not entirely useful for this purpose. More…

On March 16, 2010 I attended the SDForum meeting of the Business Intelligence SIG at SAP in Palo Alto. The topic was “Web Analytics 2.0″ presented by Avinash Kaushik, the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a day and Web Analytics 2.0. Not only was the subject matter of this presentation interesting and informative but also the speaker, Avinash, is quite a dynamic and interesting. I was informed and sometimes even entertained by Avinashes stories and analogies. This is one of the best SDForum meetings that I’ve been to so far. More…

SDForum2KeyThe SDForum Emerging Technology SIG had a very interesting panel on March 10, 2010 regarding emerging languages. The SIG organizers came up with the topic by posing the question, “if you’re going to put together a web app, what language would you use?” I thought that this panel was very informative, the questions were deep and mostly on topic, and the panelists were knowledgeable. The only problem was that the presentations were lightning fast so I could take notes fast enough butit only felt too fast from a note taking perspective. More…