Berlin Buzzwords 2015
07 Jun 2015Earlier this week I had the privilege of visiting the sixth version of the Berlin Buzzwords conference along with two other colleagues from ebay Sweden. The conference was held at the Postbahnhof venue in the Friedrichshain area of Berlin, very close to the Ostbahnhof railway station.
Berlin Buzzwords has three tracks: search, store and scale. I went there hoping to learn new things and more specifically to get tips and tricks on Elasticsearch which we use a lot at work.
Monday
Monday started with the small quest of finding the entrance to the Postbahnhof and, after a quick sign in process, a really nice breakfast.
Christopher Batey’s presentation Real time analytics with Appache Cassandra and Apache spark was a really interesting talk to kick of the conference and Patrick Peschlow’s presentation The do’s and don’ts of elasticsearch scalability and performance was my favourite of the entire conference.
Tuesday
My two favourite presentations on Tuesday were Andrew Clegg’s Signatures patterns and trends: Timeseries datamining at Etsy and Stephan Ewen’s Apache flink deep-dive. Georgi Knox’s Scale with NSQ: a realtime distributed messaging platform was also an interesting talk although I never fully understood exactly why Bitly choose to build their own messaging platform.
Wednesday
Wednesday was meetup day. I went to a meetup at a gaming company called Gameduell in the Mitte area of Berlin to watch a talk by Boaz Leskes from Elasticsearch called “Resiliency in Elasticsearch”. This talk was really interesting and gave me a lot to think about regarding our Elasticsearch setups at ebay Sweden.
Conclusion
There were a lot of sessions, most if not all of the sessions can be found on this youtube list. I encourage anyone interested in search, store or scale to watch a couple of sessions. I am going to watch most of the ones I didn’t see live over the the next few days.
Whether or not I will attend Berlin Buzzwords 2016 is still a good question. It will be on my watch list for next year.