Rachel Roumeliotis

Rachel Roumeliotis, a Strategic Content Director at O'Reilly Media, Inc., leads an editorial team that covers a wide variety of programming topics ranging from full-stack, to open source in the enterprise, to emerging programming languages. She is a Programming Chair of OSCON and O'Reilly's Software Architecture Conference. She has been working in technical publishing for 10 years, acquiring content in many areas including mobile programming, UX, computer security, and AI.

Dealing with Data in the Hadoop Ecosystem

Hadoop, Sqoop, and ZooKeeper

Kathleen Ting (@kate_ting), Technical Account Manager at Cloudera, and our own Andy Oram (@praxagora) sat down to discuss how to work with structured and unstructured data as well as how to keep a system up and running that is crunching that data.

Key highlights include:

  • Misconfigurations consist of almost half of the support issues that the team at Cloudera is seeing [Discussed at 0:22]
  • ZooKeeper, the canary in the Hadoop coal mine [Discussed at 1:10]
  • Leaky clients are often a problem ZooKeeper detects [Discussed at 2:10]
  • Sqoop is a bulk data transfer tool [Discussed at 2:47]
  • Sqoop helps to bring together structured and unstructured data [Discussed at 3:50]
  • ZooKeep is not for storage, but coordination, reliability, availability [Discussed at 4:44]

You can view the full interview here:

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The Programming Industry: Not a Woman’s World – Yet

A Frank Talk about Women in Programming with the Founder of CodeChix

Rupa Dachere (@rdachere), Founder and President of CodeChix, and I had a chance to talk programming and open source community culture at OSCON 2013. She brings up some great points about the specific problems that arise for women, talks about why she brought CodeChix to life, and what we can all do to make the programming community more diverse.

Key highlights include:

  • Women face unique challenges: Time, Resources, and Support [Discussed at 0:18]
  • And, there is support, for instance, CodeChix has refresher courses and tech talks [Discussed at 0:50]
  • The CodeChix origin story [Discussed at 2:36]
  • Cultivating positivity [Discussed at 4:02]
  • Eighteen month outlook – some companies are talking but others need to join the conversation [Discussed at 4:57]

You can view the full interview here:

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Django Is Python’s Most Mature Web Framework

Testing, Python 3, and Dealing with Technical Debt

Nathan Yergler (@nyergler), Principal Engineer at Eventbrite, and I had a chance to talk Django at OSCON 2013. We talk about why Django is the go-to choice for Pythonistas and about the growing technical debt that each programmer has to deal with on Python projects and beyond.

Key highlights include:

  • Django is mature and feature complete amidst many Python frameworks [Discussed at 0:15]
  • Testing in Django leads to straightforward code that the next programmer can read as well as you can [Discussed at 1:02]
  • Dare we discuss Django’s weaknesses like: Is Django too monolithic? [Discussed at 2:43]
  • Django at long last supports Python 3! Check out Django 1.5 [Discussed at 4:06]
  • Dealing with technical debt while programming [Discussed at 5:36]

You can view the full interview here:

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Raspberry Pi Tips

Simon Monk, full-time author of open source hardware books, talks to me about getting started with the Raspberry Pi.

Graph Databases

Emil Eifrem talks about graph databases why and when to use them and how they are taking over the database world!

A Programming Life: Choose Your Own Adventure

Honesty, Evaluation, and a Success Story

I caught up with, Amye Scavarda (@amye), Client Advisor, Acquia, and Leslie Hawthorn (@lhawthorn), Community Manager, Elasticsearch at OSCON 2013 where both gave a talk on how to grow a career, that you’ll enjoy, in the open source world and beyond. Turns out it might not be so hard.

Key highlights include:

  • Some old school first steps in taking a look at your work life [Discussed at 0:57]
  • Don’t start by trying to improve what you are worst at [Discussed at 2:38]
  • How and when should you learn new programming languages? It depends. [Discussed at 4:09]
  • Success stories aka how this has worked for Amye [Discussed at 5:24]

You can view the full interview here:

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A Quick Look at the Go Programming Language

Great at Concurrency, Easy to Learn, and Still Going Strong

Francesc Campoy Flores (@campoy83) is a Go Developer Programs Engineer at Google. I had the chance to sit down with Francesc to check in on where Go is more than a year after the 1.0 release. Turns out Go is still going strong and is a viable option for system programming over Java or C. You can get more best practice info here.

Key highlights include:

  • Goals of the Go Programming Language [Discussed at 0:14]
  • Concurrency in Go rocks! [Discussed at 1:13]
  • Developing an open source language [Discussed at 1:59]
  • Best practices from the Go Community [Discussed at 4:58]

You can view the full interview here:


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The Open Compute Project

You Are Invited to Optimize Computer Infrastructure

Jay Parikh (@jayparikh) is VP Infrastructure, Facebook. We talk about where The Open Compute Project has been and where it is going! For more information check out The Open Compute Project website.

Key highlights include:

  • Find out about the Open Compute Project [Discussed at 0:13]
  • It’s all about open hardware [Discussed at 1:10]
  • Facebook data centers have been optimized [Discussed at 2:12]
  • How do you get involved? [Discussed at 3:33]

You can view the full interview here:

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The Ever-Changing Landscape of Mobile Gaming

Unity, iOS 7, and the Quest for a Great Mobile Game Experience

Jon Manning (@desplesda) and Paris Buttfield-Addison (@parisba) talk with me about where mobile gaming is going in the next 12 months.

Key highlights include:

  • Game-specific APIs and standardized gaming accessories in iOS 7 [Discussed at 0:20]
  • Android needs to catch up [Discussed at 1:55]
  • Are tablets putting handheld consoles from Nintendo and Sony out of business? [Discussed at 3:13]
  • Independent developers vs big game studios – fight! [Discussed at 4:53]
  • Unity is now free for mobile game development [Discussed at 6:02]

You can view the full interview here:

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Controlling Drones with Clojure

OSCON 2013 Speaker Series

Carin Meier (@carinmeier) is Artisan at Neo, Founder of Gigsquid Software and OSCON 2013 Speaker. In this interview we talk about her love of Clojure and how she created a library to control her AR drone with it!

Key highlights include:

  • Clojure, a modern Lisp? [Discussed at 0:20]
  • Immutable data structures make Clojure powerful [Discussed at 1:01]
  • Yes, you can program an AR drone in Clojure [Discussed at 2:04]
  • But, how do you get started? It just takes three lines of code [Discussed at 3:47]

For the code behind the drone and Carin’s language Babar (inspired by Elephant 2000) check out her github page.

You can view the full interview here:

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