My Experience at Hadoop Summit 2010 #hadoopsummit

This week I had the opportunity the trek up north to Silicon Valley to attend Yahoo’s Hadoop Summit 2010. I love Silicon Valley. The few times I’ve been there the weather was perfect (often warmer than LA), little to no traffic, no road rage and people overall seem friendly and happy. Not to mention there are so many trees it looks like a forest! The venue was the Hyatt Regency Great America which seemed like a very posh business hotel. Walking into the lobby and seeing a huge crowd of enthusiasts and an usher every two steps was overwhelming! After being welcomed by the sound of the vuvuzela, we heard about some statistics about the growth of Hadoop over the years. Apparently in 2008 there were 600 attendees to Hadoop Summit and in 2010 attendance grew to 1000. The conference started with three hours of keynotes and sessions that everyone attended in one room. The tone was somewhat corporate in nature, but there were also several gems in there about how Yahoo uses Hadoop: A user’s click streams are mapped to latent interests, similar to mapping words to interests in topic models like LSA and LDA. Yahoo uses Hadoop [...]