The Hopper Storm Hackathon

Join us at hack/reduce a full day of Storm (and Finagle!) hacking on a 100-nodes, 800-cores cluster, this Saturday, July 20, 2013.

The Hopper Storm Hackathon is an all-day event where we want you to come in with ideas (or just curiosity and enthusiasm), form teams, spend the day hacking and then show off your stuff at the end-of-day demo session. The crowd-voted best team will win a one-year subscription for SoftLayer (worth $12,000)!

There will be:

Access to a 100-nodes, 800-cores Storm cluster
Free food & drink
Mentors to help everyone get their projects working
Data streams and data sets (details coming soon!)
Interested? You Must REGISTER HERE (http://hopperhackathonjuly2013.eventbrite.com) - it's free, but tickets are limited.

Details

What is it?

The Hopper Storm & Finagle Hackathon is an all-day power hack during which ~140 minds get access to a huge cluster (100 8-core instances with 32GB RAM and 250GB disk per node) and are set free to create something awesome using Storm.

In the first hour we’ll get seasoned Storm troopers and newbies alike up to speed and also provide a crash course on Finagle (more on that below). During the day, we'll have highly skilled mentors available to answer questions, help troubleshoot, and advise and inspire you along the way. We'll also provide lunch and dinner, caffeine and soft drinks.

Agenda

09:30a – Welcome & Introduction to processing with Storm and Finagle

10:00a – Pitch ideas and forming teams

10:15a – Tutorial (optional)

10:30a – Coding starts!

12:00p – Lunch

05:30p – Dinner. Coding ends!

06:30p – Team presentations & Voting

Why Storm?

Storm is the realtime answer to Hadoop that provides a straightforward set of primitives tolerant of any programming language. If you aren’t familiar or need a refresher, we recommend Nathan Marz’s fantastic Storm tutorial (https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki/Tutorial).

… and Finagle?

Finagle (https://blog.twitter.com/2011/finagle-protocol-agnostic-rpc-system) is Twitter’s protocol-agnostic, asynchronous RPC system is a nice fit for Storm topologies. Finagle makes writing solid, high-throughput, asynchronous services that your topologies can consume a breeze.

Why bother?

Because we'll have awesome sponsors providing compute (SoftLayer), mentors (Hopper, Visible Measures) and space (hack/reduce), all to give you a unique occasion to have access to computing power, Storm, fellow hackers and experienced Storm troopers all in the same room!

At the end, the crowd-voted best presentation will win a 1-year subscription for SoftLayer (a $12,000 value).

Where is it?

At hack/reduce, Boston's big data hacker space in Kendall Square @ 275 Third Street on the corner of Binney Street.

What should I bring?

Your laptop and charger
Project ideas:
Everyone is welcome to bring their own project ideas and find team members at the event. And if you don't have a precise project idea, don't worry, you can join a team!
Data streams to play with:
We recommend this list by Programmable Web of 62 Real Time APIs (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/04/17/62-real-time-apis-twitter-thrutu-and-pusher/) and you can find more with this directory (http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory). We'll also be creating a few sample spouts to connect to Storm to help get you started. If you have others you like to play with, feel free to share!