A friend said, “Vienna needs a Hadoop User Group” and I agreed with him. The next step was to initialize a Meetup group. Meetup is a platform, where everyone can organize any kind of meetings for any kind of topic. Hadoop recently just started to gain a little traction in Austria and Vienna and I think it’s the perfect time to start a group like this.

This group is for everyone of any level of skill using Apache Hadoop who is located in Vienna. The focus of the group is clearly technical with an eye on use cases. I try to organize technical talks of Hadoop related vendors for the sessions. Also, I want to establish the opportunity working together on real world problems and get hands on Hadoop. In this group we will create a network of Hadoop Users, discuss recent and interesting (technical) topics, eat, drink and – most importantly – have fun together.

I’d like the group to be interactive and that everyone has the opportunity to contribute.

For the first Meetup on Wednesday, May 18, I plan to briefly introduce the goals of the group. I believe all members of the group should brainstorm together, on what all of us expect of the group in the future and try to figure out how often we should meet and which contents we want to work on.

My ideas on how it could look like in the future:

• One of us could provide some code and walk the others through it. That way the experienced of us can provide feedback and give hints on what to improve and the less experienced gain knowledge.
• We can define a project to work on together: e.g., building a Hadoop cluster together out of Raspberry Pis, writing streaming applications in Apache Storm or Apache Spark together, or whatever you want,…
• I plan to combine the Meetup every now and then with the Vienna Kaggle Meetup and do a session about “Data Science and Hadoop”.
• Similarly to the Vienna Kaggle group, I created a git organisation for code that we work on together. If you are interested to join, just contact me and I will give you access.

I am looking forward to getting to know you as well as hearing your ideas on what to contribute to the group.