May 2011 Meet-up Notes
Lightning Talks:
Ben - Debian Packaging
- pip/easy_install are not fit for large-scale deployments
- Debian packages are more standardized and more scalable
- Quick overview of using dh_make, dbuild and dpkg to build Debian packages. Overview of description, control and rules files.
- Easy to use for simple packages, but the sheer number of things that are possible with Debian packages means that there's a learning curve for more advanced functionality.
- Debian packages are easier to automate with puppet/mcollective
Dan - MRJob
- Map-Reduce framework written in Python
- Map-Reduce is a way of designing algorithms that makes them easy to parallelize.
- MRJob is a framework that makes writing map-reduce algorithms easy.
- Define mapper and reducer - get called automatically; use yield statements to lazy evaluate results
- You can trivially run your jobs on a Hadoop or Amazon EMR cluster
- For a good video intro for both MapReduce and MRJob, see: http://tinyurl.com/mrjobpycon
Ravi - Fitparel
Clothing sizes across brands vary wildly, largely due to "vanity sizing". fitparel.com is an endeavor undertaken by one of our members, Ravi, to overcome these discrepancies and help you find the correct size for apparel no matter what the brand. The beta site has just been launched, so check it out! Contact Ravi at chityala