Avid readers will note that the Nestoria engineering team attended YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen a couple of weeks back. As usual, the conference featured many interesting talks, two of which were given by members of the Nestoria team. Marc Tobias related some of the lessons we have learned building a high-volume / high-performance ETL system from scratch. His talk was very well attended and sparked some interesting discussions about FOSS ETL and Business Intelligence systems. I (Mike) spoke on a topic of much interest in the Nestoria world - profiling and optimization. As always in the perl world, there are lots of different tools out there and some are more right for the job than others. Encouragingly, many of the best packages are relative newcomers - clarly demonstrating that Perl is alive and kicking. Thanks in particular to Tim Bunce for helping me prepare and for giving me something to talk about.
Conferences are not just about prepared talks, though. You can sometimes learn a lot more at lunch and during coffee breaks. Lots of informal discussions lead me to believe that our development team is doing all of the right things, but that we still have a few tricks to learn. One very notable area of development is distributed applications and cloud computing. Systems like EC2 and Google App Engine are becoming more and more of a fixture in the technology landscape. It remains to be seen how we will integrate these new developments into the Nestoria engine (if all all). There is no doubt that new technologies are presenting many opportunities for building faster, more scalable systems.
Many thanks to the Copenhagen.pm for pulling together an excellent conference. The waterfront dinner was a particular highlight and perfect example of the high level of organization and style that characterized the entire event. Also thanks to Marc Tobias for preparing a few notable images from the conference.
A variety of memorable images from YAPC::Europe 2008
This is the third summer of Lokku’s internship program, and we have been very lucky to bring in 3 talented engineers. Yoav was the first to join. He is working closely with MTM on a variety of projects related to listing quality and distribution. Croydon Chris - just off his second year at Durham - arrived second. He and Spiros are concentrating on further automating our ETL system. Alistair came all the way from the University of Glasgow and started just yesterday. His six month placement with Lokku is part of completing an undergraduate Masters Degree. Alistair will be working with me on improving and scaling the system we use for listings de-duplication. It’s always nice to have some new blood around to shake things up, and we hope to learn almost as much from our interns as they learn from us.
As mentioned before, the Nestoria engineering team will be attending YAPC::Europe 2008 where MTM and myself will be speaking. We are also very pleased to now be an official sponsor of the conference. As voracious consumers of free and open source software, it’s good to have a chance to give a little something back and to actively participate in the lively perl community. Thanks to the Copenhagen Perlmongers for organizing what looks to be another great YAPC.
Hello Nestorcandinavians,
MTM and I just got word that our talk proposals have been accepted for YAPC Europe 2008. We had a good time at last year’s event and are proud to be actively contributing this time around. I am going to speak about the various Perl profiling modules and MTM will relate some of the lessons learned building a high volume/low maintenance ETL system. Alex and Spiros will also be present in Copenhagen, so the entire team will be taking a break from building new features and concentrating on learning a few new tricks. We look forward to seeing friend old and new in August.
Neskimos,
Nestoria was proud to be a sponsor of the 2007 London Perl Workshop for the second year. All four of our talks went down pretty well:
This year’s event was as good if not better than the last. Thanks to the organizers for pulling everything together - especially the beery pub meet-up after.
Nestoredes,
The next few weeks are busy ones on the London tech calendar. The Nestoria team are looking forward to attending a couple of events:
Sound interesting? Why not come along?
[Corrected 29 Nov 2007 - Sat is the 1st of Dec, not the second.]
N3stor!ans,??
The Nestoria Tech team is four for four in talk proposals for the London Perl Workshop (LPW) 2007:
- Marc Tobias is going to talk about what we have learned in providing a public API.
- Ed will gather the kids around the campfire and tell a haunting ghost story about the perils of internationalis(z)ation.
- Spiros has chosen to share a few passages from his collection of sonnets about??A/B testing (also known as “bucket” testing in some circles).
- Mike??has to chosen??lead the audience in a song of praise for development infrastructure and discuss the joy and peril of code coverage, profiling, and benchmarking tools.
The other talks look to be of the same high standard as last year, so I encourage anyone with an interest in Perl to come along, if not just to nerd out a bit in the pub afterwards.?? A big thanks to the organizers.?? Hope to see you there.
Greetings Nestopathians,
You may have noticed a short lull in Nestoria development last week as most of the team decamped to Vienna to attend YAPC Europe 2007. For those not in the know, “The Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPCs) are grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language coordinated by The Perl Foundation”. The European event is the biggest annual Perl gathering on the continent, and this year’s was the most well-attended to date with about 400 participants. The Perl community is big, growing, and very active and we’re happy to be part of it both as consumers (most of Nestoria is built with Perl) and contributors (Nestoria engineers maintain several CPAN modules and have plans to add more).
Although the enthusiastic keynote presentations by Larry Wall (father of Perl) and Damian Conway (uncle of Perl?) were very inspiring, and the content of the many talks comprehensive and instructive, it was the informal chats between presentations and over coffees and beers that will really stick. There is a big ecosystem of open source tools and projects out there, and nothing beats the advice of the experienced when it comes to choosing what software to use and how best to use it. The Nestoria team left the conference full of fresh ideas and with a pile of notes to digest.
A big thanks to the YAPC Europe organizers and participants. Hope to see you next year in Copenhagen.
#!/usr/bin/nestoredes,
use WebService::Nestoria::Search;
{
Just about everything that makes Nestoria go is built using the Perl programming language and related tools. Perl is a flexible and widely-used alternative to more “enterprise” platforms like Java and .NET and has a larger and better-organized collection of free libraries available than Ruby or Python. We find that it scratches our technical itches very nicely.
To stay current, most of the Nestoria Tech Team will be attending
YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna at the end of August - the biggest yearly Perl event in Europe. We look forward to seeing a lot of friends from the London Perl Mongers and meeting other Perl users from across the continent. Larry Wall himself will be in attendance and will undoubtedly give a talk about what we can expect from Perl 6 - the as-yet-unready-for-prime-time next version of the language. If anybody wants to talk about the challenges building and scaling a vertical search engine built on Perl, Apache, MySQL, and Linux, do look us up.
}