We met. We hung out. And, walked through the *Dynamo paper*, which was released in 2007, and is quite self-contained. That makes it “a NoSQL classic”. Good paper with which to open a reading circle. Now we have some pre-understanding for upcoming papers.

Photo by kalavinka

Other content

Neo4J’s Peter Neubauer, riffed on on Google’s data hugeness, which led us further afield: Google / Big Data; Crowdsourcing — WordNet; Concept: Discard 99% of the data, using the top 1%.

Thoughts on format

We’re currently toying with new/different perspectives/formats:

• “Developer Perspective”
• “Infrastructure/Scaling Perspective”
• “Arch. Perspective”
• “Apps/Ops Perspective”

Polyglot cases: How do you work with several multi-database setups?

Event bus usage: Some people use NoSQL stuff for the event buses. What are pros and cons here?

Do you need anything else there? I really enjoy this peek behind the scenes, implementation problems, etc. It is not something I can bring directly to my workplace and use, but I like the challenge of understanding large concepts together. The current format suits me well.a

Some hints and tips I picked up:

Google’s research end-of-level boss Peter Norvig’s talk at Berkeley (YouTube you-feel-lucky) — summarizing all the fields of research. (His official title is Director of Search Quality.)

A question: Is Stepanov’s Elements of Programming any good? Is it for me? (C++, math, beautiful type-setting.)

Next paper?

Google’s Bigtable? Cassandra? I cheated, and begun reading the Cassandra one. Let’s see how that goes.

I’ve just hopped off the morning train from Copenhagen, clutching a crumpled paper that I just finished. I got wind of it through the NoSQL Summer reading club’s Malmö instance.

On the way into the office, I saw my FOSS friend T, waiting for a car. Handing him the printed copy of the paper, I enjoyed a few minutes of database banter before heading into the building.

This is how I want my tech community to be like. Present, alive, and friendly. Thanks!

You can follow nosqlsummer on Twitter. Below is their pitch.

A seasonal, worldwide reading club for databases, distributed systems & NOSQL-related scientific papers.

A NOSQL Summer is a network of local reading groups, that will decipher & discuss NOSQL-related articles, from late June to early September 2010. Each group sets its own meeting pace (usually once a week or once every two weeks) and select which papers are up for discussion.

At every cycle, members read the selected paper at home and then meet up for an hour or so to discuss, debate and answer their own questions.

We then encourage you to produce an annotated version of the paper, or short summary that we can then publish here for the rest of world to peruse.

Please note that, in most cities, you do not need to sign up to attend NOSQL Summer meetings. You just need to have read the paper planned for the week by your local chapter and show up at the designated meeting place!

Feel free to skip a meeting or jump in at any time. We’re trying to make this low-maintenance and flexible, for everybody to get a chance to learn more about a fuzzy concept that’s here to stay.

Kan du säga shibbolet is the title of her latest novel, which I’m currently enjoying.

She’s like the anti-Pär Thörn.

It turns out that JSpec is a BDD specification tool, which uses some Ruby to run its specs. The syntax was a mix of Ruby and JavaScript in the same file.

Mats Bryntse had quit his job to make an ExtJS web app, and he’ll be on his way to San Francisco in a few months. The app he made, Ext.ux.Scheduler is impressive.

Later, I got fiddly. Programming languages had come up in conversation. Scala! Clojure! Erlang! OCaml! So, I installed a few of them. We deciphered a bit of Scala, and tried it out. Quite entrancing, getting it to run, when four people stand around and shout suggestions. The Erlang Eclipse extension Erlide was hastily installed, but we ran out of time before we got anything done with it. And the title of the meetup is “Öresund JavaScript Meetup”. The irony was not lost on us.

“It’s dead easy to make Erlang web backends!”, I later exclaimed. “Can I quote you on that?” David retorted.

So, there’s my challenge. Using ErlyWeb, MochiWeb, and others, and perhaps Mnesia (the database), I’ll have to work hard until the next meetup to get an environment running – and make a web application.

Speaking of the next meetup, David, who’s working for streaming outfit XStream in Copenhagen, will try and convince his people that a JavaScript Meetup is just what they need to host, so we’ll probably be in Copenhagen next time.

What’s more? There were shoutouts to the Copenhagen PHP Meetup, and talk about coding dojos.

It’s situated in a backstreet, and is cheap and popular with the active artists. These facts sum up to a great endorsement.

I’ll report back when I’ve been there.

In other news: Rainer Hartleb’s “Jordbro suite”, I’ll soon have it on DVDs.

He explains it is a large-format camera. 25cm square negatives! Hands me a business card that points to his website. (Oh! That website has a picture of the wonderful camera, go look!)

He also explained that his project is to take portraits of people of many nationalities, and as I left him, an English-speaking man (who would’ve fit well into The Crimson Pirate) asked the same questions I had just posed.

The evening sun was just the right kind. I hope I’ll see the pictures he made. (Other photographer Stephen does not take pictures, he makes them; I learnt that from Peter.)

Malmö

At Jägersro Center the local electronics specialist Bejoken is joined by almost-an-institution Elfa (Jägershillgatan 20. Open 8AM-6PM Mon-Fri).

More inner-city access can be given by Electrokit at Södervärn. They’re open daily at 10-16, according to their website. None of my sources have been there.

Copenhagen

Brinck at Nørreport station get a review in MitKBH. They are quirky and old-fashioned in their ways, but run a good supply.

RS online also has a Swedish website. Looks very promising.

Please post your tips for shopping area electronics.

This coming Tuesday night, July 22 we’ll deal with Javascript. It’s thus a theme. And, no less than two people asked to make presentations:

Morgan Roderick (from Gazebo) explains Event Delegates

Mark Wubben (sIFR lead developer) will do a short version of “Bringing Typography to the Web with sIFR 3”

Location: Västergatan 23, Malmö, that is Hypergene’s offices (ring its door-bell). From 19.00 onwards.

I used the simple Ruby project Webgen to make the site, and rsync to get it online.

Just to let you know, so you can spread the word. I’ll write more when I know more.

Update! An attentive reader, also being the organizer of the upcoming event emailed me, and told me more. It’s called “Hack-a-ton”, note the Scandinavian spelling. URL changed to reflect this.