Hack/Reduce on Saturday (2011/26/3) was a real success. Just look at some of the tweets! Here are some pictures from Hack/Reduce participants: Hack/Reduce on Picasa and Steven’s pics on Flickr.

The day started out with coffee and a presentation by the team at Hopper about Mapreduce and about using the infrastructure and data mappers we had created. We quickly ran through a tutorial and examples available on github. Most people that were present hadn’t used Mapreduce before so the overview was quite exhaustive and took about one and a half hours.  We also gave a rundown of accessing and running on the Amazon Elastic Mapreduce instance that we were using.

Some teams had already started hacking during the presentation. For the ones who didn’t already have a set team we gave the opportunity to pitch their idea quickly or just talk about what they might want to build. About 15 people gave a short pitch about what they might want to build. Several teams were formed from this when people got some idea of what the others’ were interested in and could connect with other developers with matching interests. Continue reading →