March Clojure Users Group Meeting: Cascalog

Alex Robbins from Factual will give us a preview of his upcoming Clojure/West talk on Cascalog.

Cascalog is a Clojure library that makes it easier to write distributed batch processing jobs. It is built on top of Hadoop, but allows computations and queries to be written at a much higher level of abstraction. Cascalog allows large, distributed processing jobs to be written in a declarative manner, greatly shortening and simplifying writing many Hadoop tasks.

This talk will provide an introduction to Cascalog, a brief tour of its features, and finish with writing a sample application using some live coding. The intent is to help people unfamiliar with Cascalog to identify places it could be of use in their systems.

Alex Robbins is a developer at Factual, where he uses Cascalog and Clojure to wrangle data. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his better half, Sally, and a boston terrier. When not programming, he enjoys riding his bike, playing board games and doing krav maga. He co-organizes the Dallas/Fort Worth Clojure user group and can't wait for Dallas to become the center of the Clojure world.

---

Parking and Directions:

We're in the Gateway West building, next to the Westfield Century City mall on the east side. It's the only building with big red "Westfield" signs on top.

We recommend you park at the mall. They will charge $1/hr for up to 3 hours and then $1 for every 15 minutes (details). Our building is a short easy walk: Exit from the mall parking garage up to ground level, head east, pass the Lens Crafters, and you'll be able to enter the west side of 1801. Then just hit the elevators to go all the way up to floor 14, and we're in Suite 1450.

In a pinch, if you park in the parking garage for Gateway West, we may be able to score you parking validation. However, we cannot promise it and therefore prefer you use the mall parking. So if you choose this option, please be ready to pay out of pocket.