Hiatus From Posting While Creating and Then Teaching Hadoop For Developers

on hadoop

In February 2014 I was approached by UMBC Training to see if I were interested in creating a Hadoop 2-based Hadoop for Developers class. I was a bit conflicted about the time commitment and relatively short timeline (teach first class by the end of June) for an extracurricular effort in addition to full-time employment. But I decided to take the challenge and develop a course that I would have enjoyed.

There is nothing like creating a course and teaching to really get a deeper all-around understanding of a subject area. Using Tom White’s excellent Hadoop:The Definitive Guide and Alex Holmes’ Hadoop in Action (2nd edition MEAP) I developed the course materials using the Enron email dataset from CMU to create examples and labs for all the available Hadoop features. Stored the original emails in an Avro container file.

Now that the course is done and taught (with very nice feedback!) it is back to irregularly scheduled continuous self-improvement! For now, on to Apache Spark, Java 8, Eclipse Luna, catching up on Communications of ACM reading and generally keeping up with the quickly evolving big data ecosystem.