FOSDEM 2014: a retrospective.
For those of you who arn't familiar with FOSDEM, it brings together the open source community from all across Europe for a weekend of fantastic seminars and discussions about all aspects of open source software.
Over 5000 people attended, all decending on Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM is highly developer-oriented and needless to say the discussions were awesome, however with over 500 lectures to choose from I had to be extreemly selective about which talks to attend. Every talk I attended was packed out to capacity, with people standing in the aisles of even the largest of lecture theatres.
Elasticsearch at FOSDEM:
My main drive of attending was to hear the Elasticsearch talks, and to sync with the ES team in anticipation of the imminent Elasticsearch 1.0 release. My excitement about Elasticsearch 1.0 is growing each day, and it was great to talk in detail about the benifits and specific implementation of the flagship new features of 1.0, namely the Elasticsearch Aggregations feature and the new Snapshot and Restore functionality, which I've written about recently.
On Sunday morning Honza Král from Elasticsearch led a talk entitled Elasticsearch 1.0: Exploring the new features which was an awesome rundown of Elasticsearch 1.0 including live code examples and an open Q&A session afterwards. Look out for the video which should be posted on the FOSDEM site within the next few days.
Other recommended talks:
I also attended some great talks about Native JSON support in PostgreSQL, The benefits of Redis, Schema Design with MongoDB and Hadoop with YARN. Some of the graphdb talks really got my brain ticking too.
I could reflect endlessly on the themes that developed over the weekend, however this is only intended as a very quick post. All sessions will soon be online, so I'd recommend you guys check them out. If you're based in Europe, I really recommend you check out FOSDEM next year.
Elasticsearch Aggregations framework
Read my overview of the new Aggregations Framework in Elasticsearch v1.0
Elasticsearch Snapshot and Restore
Read my overview of the new Snapshot and Restore features in Elasticsearch v1.0