Delve deeper into Spark

We've reviewed the results of our two polls and the majority has indicated they would prefer to schedule our Meetups on Wednesday evenings every 6-8 weeks. So....

Put away your NCAA brackets and get working on your taxes so you don't have any excuses that prevent you from joining us for our next Apache Spark Meetup on the evening of Wednesday, April 15th. Andy Burns and his crew from Illumination Works have graciously offered to host our gathering at their offices in the Mason area.

Agenda:

6:00 - 6:30 - Social Hour - Pizza and Drinks provided by Illumination Works

6:30 - 7:15 - Andy Konwinski from Databricks will be joining us via video conference and discussing highlights from the Spark East Summit keynotes, near term Spark roadmap, as well as taking some questions. Andy is one of the co-founders of Databricks, worked at Berkley's AMPLab on Spark, and is a committer for Apache Spark.

7:15 - 8:30 - Here is your chance to try your hand at writing some Spark code and running it. We are going to try having a "hands on tutorial" on some simple exercises using Apache Spark. We will provide a sample dataset with some simple data exploration and manipulation exercises. You provide your laptop and try to solve them. In order to take part in the hands on portion of the evening we ask that you have a laptop with Unix/Linux/MacOS environment. Further more we would ask you to download and unzip Apache Spark 1.3.0 with hadoop2.4 on your machine prior to the tutorial. For the tutorial, we will be working in Scala, although we will also try and have a Python & Java versions of the answers available as well. Even if you don't have a laptop, you can still come and watch as we work through the exercises on the projection screen.

We hope to see you on the 15th.