Earlier this week, I sat with Brendan Dillon, Director of Engineering, who was fresh from hosting Monday’s packed Spark meetup at Nitro EMEA HQ in Dublin. We chatted about the technology, the meetup (the second one of its kind), and why the event has been so popular.
What is Spark?
Spark is a big data analytics technology that is built using Scala, with its mechanisms also drawing a lot of ideas from Scala. I believe it is cutting edge technology and will be the future of analytics.
The meetup has been oversubscribed the last two times, can you explain why?
I think the biggest thing about our Spark meetup is that we’re talking about the latest and greatest in technology. Spark appeals to the early adopters and the people who are most passionate about technology—exactly the type of individuals we want to have working with us here at Nitro.
Dublin has become a hub for some of the best engineers in Europe and we wanted to create an event where they could gather to meet like-minded engineers, network, and discuss ideas.
We’re a tech community-minded company and we organize these events to share knowledge, because we believe that being part of a strong community makes Nitro itself stronger. The fact that this event has had a waitlist in both instances shows just how much space there is in the Dublin tech landscape for more activities like it, and we hope to continue putting them on.
It also helps that the meetups bring top tech talent into our amazing office and give them a feel for what a great place Nitro is to work!
What is different about this meet up?
We were delighted to have our Chief Scientist, Alexy Khrabrov in Dublin with us for latest meet up this week. He presented on the power of Scala-based transformations in the context of Apache Spark, also bringing with him some stories about what Silicon Valley’s brightest start-ups are working on.
Alexy was fresh from the huge success of Text By The Bay, the world’s best Natural Language Processing conference, where he updated everyone on some of the cutting edge research that is going on in data science, AI, machine learning, etc. Alexy knows many of the leading researchers in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area and also discussed the importance of excellent networking skills.
Also speaking on the night was Javier Arrieta, another Nitro engineer and a legend in his own right, who presented on Spark Streaming.
What’s next?
We hope to continue with our monthly meetups so we can grow Nitro’s reputation as one of the strongest tech brands in EMEA and the home of cutting-edge technologies produced by the very best engineers in the world.
Check out the video and Slideshare of our first Spark Meet Up in Dublin in April.
Connect with Nitro on Twitter and LinkedIn to find out about any upcoming meetups.
