While planning your trip to Berlin Buzzwords, it's well worth trying to arrive on the Sunday 25th May. Firstly because that'll mean you get a chance to see some of the lovely city of Berlin, but more importantly so you can attend the Sunday evening pre-conference BarCamp!
Old hands can skip this paragraph, but for many other people, BarCamps can be a slightly strange and intimidating beast, but they needn't be! Run along unconference lines, there is no set schedule before the event, only the main themes of the evening (those of the conference itself). The evening begins with a blank schedule, but after the welcome is filled in based on what people want to learn about, what people want to share, and who's present. Some people participate by leading a session, others by asking interesting questions, and the most popular are those who take notes to be shared online! Everyone takes part as best they can, sharing their knowledge where possible, learning lots otherwise.
If you don't know what's going to be covered, how do you know if you should come? How do you convince people to let you arrive a day early? Well, we can't promise you any given session, but we can tell you a little bit about what we've had in previous years, to hopefully whet your appetite. Last year's most popular sessions included:
* Hadoop: The good, the bad
* Which NoSQL to use when, as based on real world experience? Couch, Mongo, Cassandra etc
* Twitter Storm
* Parsing logs at scale
* Elastic Search vs SOLR, in theory and production
* Elastic Search + Raspberry Pi demo
Some sessions tend to work more like mini talks, typically for something very new and popular where we've an expert. Some are round table discussions, such as around picking solutions based on the experience of everyone. Some are people trying a live demo of a system. Some are a debate, such as the time we invited the SQL standards body and set them loose on the NoSQL crowd, or when we put two solutions head-to-head. There's normally 2-3 session in parallel, so you can pick what works for you. We can't promise what'll be there, but we can be sure it'll be a great night!
The Berlin Buzzwords BarCamp will take place on Sunday 25th May, at Soda Moon at Kulturbrauerei. Registration starts at 4.30 pm, and all attendees of Berlin Buzzwords are invited to participate. Just sign up for a "Sunday Barcamp and Meetups only" when you book your bbuzz ticket, and we'll see you in Berlin in May!
- by Nick Burch
Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden
