Edd Dumbill
Edd Dumbill is a principal analyst for O'Reilly Radar, and program chair for the O'Reilly Strata Conference and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
Big data, cool kids
Making sense of the hype-cycle scuffle.
The big data world is a confusing place. We’re no longer in a market dominated mostly by relational databases, and the alternatives have multiplied in a baby boom of diversity.
These child prodigies of the data scene show great promise…
Let’s do this the hard way
Being both liberal and safe in programming is hard
Recent discoveries of security vulnerabilities in Rails and MongoDB led me to thinking about how people get to write software.
In engineering, you don’t get to build a structure people can walk into without years of study. In software, we often write what the heck we want and go back to clean up the mess later. It works, but the…
Aaron was one of us
We can change the future, and we must.
I sat last night at Aaron Swartz’s memorial in San Francisco, among the very people who built the Internet, the web, the culture of young entrepreneurialism and Web 2.0 startups. Among the pioneers of Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, open source software and those fighting to keep the public domain public.
Aaron was one of them.
It was a family reunion,…
The future of programming
Unraveling what programming will need for the next 10 years.
Programming is changing. The PC era is coming to an end, and software developers now work with an explosion of devices, job functions, and problems that need different approaches from the single machine era. In our age of exploding data, the ability to do some kind of programming is increasingly important to every job, and programming is no longer the sole preserve of an…
Saving publishing, one tweet at a time
Helping both readers and writers look good on social media.
Traffic comes to online publishers in two ways: search and social. Because of this, writing for the tweet is a new discipline every writer and editor must learn. You’re not ready to publish until you find the well crafted headline that fits in 100 characters or so, and pick an image that looks great shared at thumbnail size on…
True data liberation with IFTTT and Google Drive
Web services combine to give us our data, and help us use it.
The web service IFTTT (If this, then that) accesses popular web applications via their APIs, and lets users create new actions based on changes. For instance,…
Why big data is big: the digital nervous system
Why we all need to understand and use big data.
Where does all the data in “big data” come from? And why isn’t big data just a concern for companies such as Facebook and Google? The answer is that the web companies are the forerunners. Driven by social, mobile, and cloud technology, there is an important transition taking place, leading us all to the…
Building conference programs: it’s about the attendee
The essential principles of conference development.
I’ve chaired computer industry conferences for ten years now. First for IDEAlliance (XML Europe, XTech), and recently with O’Reilly Media (OSCON, Strata). Over the years I have tried to balance three factors as I select talks: proposal quality, important new work, and practical value of the knowledge to the attendees.
As the competition for speaking slots at both Strata and…
Now available: "Planning for Big Data"
A free handbook for anybody wanting to understand and use big data.
"Planning for Big Data" is a new book that helps you understand what big data is, why it matters, and where to get started.
Data markets compared
A look at data market offerings from four providers.
Strata chair Edd Dumbill provides an overview of the most mature data markets (Infochimps, Factual, Windows Azure Data Marketplace, DataMarket), and contrasts their different approaches and facilities.
