Author: Geert Van Landeghem

Geert is ceo and consultant at foundation.be, a Java Consultancy Services Company. Working the last years as architect, agile coach, team lead and instructor. Spent the 90s focussing on AS400, the 00s on Java and perhaps next decade on bigdata. Interested in adapting and applying emerging technologies, and to instruct others what has been learned. Working on a third Big Data project at the moment.

Spark!

More than 80 people showed up at our last meetup focused on Spark. Because there are more and more signs that Spark will become the successor to Hadoop MapReduce we invited some people who are already using Spark in production.

Andy gave an introduction to functional progamming and Scala in just 45 minutes, which is  definitely not enough for passing all details. His slides can be found here

Excellent meetup. The Scala introduction was so quick that it blew my mind but gave me enough information to follow the rest

(Eric Darchis)

We had Toni Verbeiren who gave an introduction to Spark and demonstrated Spark from the command line. Follow the links to his slides and visualization code.

Very interesting mix of Scala, Spark and Use Case

(Peter Vandenabeele)

Gerard Maas showed us how Spark is used in production at Virdata.com. With a cool demo of their platform in the end. His slides are availabele here: Spark-at-Virdata

It was Sparkling! (Radek O)

I am always amazed by the quality of the BigData.be and ScalaBe presentations. Big up to all of you ! (Frederic)

The presentations were recorded by Parleys.com and to be published in a “bigdata.be” channel. We’ll let you know when they become available over there.

Thanks to Ordina for the location and for providing food and drinks.

See you next time, we are always looking for venues and presenters.

 

23RD MEETUP – DATA SCIENCE/ELASTICSEARCH/ELECTIONS

On May 27th we had our 23rd meetup in Ghent kindly hosted by iMinds. We had a healthy mix of technical and business items.

Following presentations were given:

  1. Introduction to the Brussels Data Science Meetup by Philippe Van Impe (30 min)

Philippe gave an introduction to this Meetup, the projects they are working (with possible link to big data) and their link to the non-profit datakind organization (“data for good”)

His presentation can be found here.

2.  Introduction to ElasticSearch by Eric Rodriguez (60 min)

In just less than one hour Eric gave an introduction to all features of ElasticSearch.  During the presentation Toon Vanaght showed how ES is used at data.be.

His presentation can be found here and you are also invited to checkout the Belgian ElasticSearch Meetup group.

3.  Election Bingo by Stijn Beauprez (30 min)

The vk14-bingo.be application can be used for making up your mind for voting on sunday, it gives you insight into the topics our political parties are talking about.

Stijn demo-ed the application and explained which technologies were used to implement this application.

His presentation can be found here.

4.  De Verkiezingen by Philippe Kerremans (10 min)

Deverkiezingen.be website is another application of using social media to get insight into the mother of all elections. Philippe explained how they used ElasticSearch and D3.js among other technologies.

His presentation can be downloaded here: BigDataMeetupDeverkiezingen

Many thanks to iMinds for hosting the location and DataCrunchers for providing drinks.

In the mean time we now have more than 700 members!