in essence i'm a software developer, what i think i do better is produce code! i'm so passionate about coding… that after while coding (10 years) i got involved into open source development "world".

after "living" in this community for a while i started to see that are some misunderstandings around the expression: "open source". people from different areas (ie. programming, marketing, sales, government, etc…) understand open source differently, even people from the same area have different opinions about open source.

and this misunderstanding/misconception are spread out there… there are people that support open source (even without realizing what it really is), there are people that just don't get it, there are people that hate it (usually after an explanation about what it is, they change their position), there are people that uses open source as a sales argument, there are people that use open source as an argument to *not* buy something, there are people that dress "che guevera" t-shirst and say that open source is the new communism and there are people that believe on it… in resume: open source concept is messy, everybody has its own.

during this post i'll try to expose my thoughts about open source, a point of view of a passionated software developer and a start-up co-founder that is creating his venture creating an open source tool.

first of all… let's remove from our path some myths around open source, the first and most important, what is it? open source is just a way of build software – a development model, period. nothing more… it's just a term that enables you say to the world that your code is open and everybody can *see* it. just that! simple isn't it?!

so… as you can see, in my point of view all developers (that usually are passionate about coding) should love open source… they can show to the world what they are doing (for the good or the bad).. they can see what other developers are doing… all of us can learn from each other (do you know a better way to improve programming skills than reading and writing code? i don't!)… and once the result of our work are open… we usually care more about its quality… you'll try to write a clean code 'cos, in the end of the day your code gonna be your business card (i said it so many times and i'm not alone… github is promoting it).

now let me remove another myth: open source does not means free of charge, period. people and companies are making money with open source… and its fair! do you know anybody (that is not rich) that can work all day long without a salary in the end of the month? i don't! but if the code is open and everybody can download and use it… how can you make money?! in the same way all software related companies does (open or closed): through services! or do you think that is common a big company adopt a technology, build all its i.t. department to use it and don't care about: training, support, stable releases, particular features and etc… marten mickos (if you are not familiar with this name… let me mention that he was the ceo of mysql that sold it for 1 billion to sun) recently said: the best thing that we can do for open source is making money! once you make money you can invest more on software development!

so… could you see: open source is not communism, period. its not free of charge (you can start for free… but if your business need it… you will, or at least should, buy services like training and support for it).

other point is that people, that don't understand open source, may concern about security… people use to say: if its open source, anybody can modify it, where is the security?! this is a myth… open source means that people can *see* your source code, *not* modify it, in fact few people have the right to commit code. and as people can see the source… what happens with security is the opposite: it became more secure. developers can find bugs easily (reading the sources)… and report it to the development team.

so… open source is usually more secure, period. people can see the code, its easier to find new bugs 'cos there is much more people looking at source code.

now let's talk about community, a word that is always related to open source. first of all… let's make clear that open source projects aren't based on democracy (yes.. its not!) most of them are based on benevolent dictator governance model, in general words it means that the project lead has the final word. the project lead is responsible to drive the project… he decides the new features, release dates and etc. in the same time open source projects are usually driven by meritocracy, if you are an active member and contribute with relevant things, you have more respect and, in some time, you may have the right to commit code (usually it takes time to you reach this level).

other important truth needs to be said: its difficult to build a community around a project (open source or not) – we have lot's of project that have a strong community around it (lucene, jboss, hibernate, couchdb, etc..) but we have much more projects that have almost nobody except the lead and one or two contributors. if the project is sponsored by a company (alfresco, jackrabbit, mysql, jboss, etc..) is rare to have people contributing from outside the company.

so… if its difficult to have external contributors, what can you extract from the open source community?! many things… most relevant for me are: continuous feedback, testing and early adoption.

now… let me talk about business around open source: there is a lot of it, period. i've already discussed a lot about it with many friends… most that are involved on selling use to say that open source is a business model… it is a huge mistake. it can be used as a business tactic.. the same kind of tactic that makes people sell their product for lower prices or execute a freemium model. the business model itself just uses open source as a strategic element, nothing more. except if you are trying to sell a methodology to someone (which is odd for me)… you can't sell "open source" per se, 'cos its a development model.

in terms of business, what you can do is take the advantage of your development model. which advantage?! for me, this is the real point around open source, one of the best characteristics that a company or person can have nowadays (specially in business): transparency! you can use this transparency to facilitate your selling (usually you can stimulate your selling with a go to market strategy like lower prices). the most important asset from you is open! can you imagine a more transparent model?! i don't!

and based on this advantage, i advocate that start-ups should invest building their software as open source, it can be a huge competitive advantage once you are transparent! you can show to your potential customer your quality… and this transparency enables you to convert it to a trustworthy relationship. and can you see a better way to do business once you're on a trustworthy relationship between you and your customer?! i don't!

so.. if open source is so great.. why microsoft, oracle, sap and other traditional closed source companies aren't opening their sources?

first of all… they are ;) – ok, they are just starting… but they are getting involved. check by yourself here:

• we love open source, says microsoft
• sap as a case study for open source engagement
• oracle and open source
• strategic members of eclipse foundation
• apache foundation sponsors (take a look to the size of microsoft logo there)

but if we talk about those companies open their main products source code… its bit harder. first of all… if all these companies wish open their main product source code, it would be really difficult, 'cos several internal components of their products are from third party and they aren't allowed to do it (and if they do, they will have to pay tons of money for all those ip). second reason: they created their products closed… until now they weren't thinking about open source… can you imagine how messy are those code base? how it could affect their image? if an open source project (that is created with the openness in mind) "sometimes" are complicated and messy… can you imagine a proprietary/closed code? so… open their well know products is not an option (and its reasonable and easy to understand).

but it does not mean that their aren't investing in open source software… all those companies are supporting some foundation (like apache), all of them (may be not all, but the majority) are creating open source projects. most of those companies are interacting with open source community… sponsoring events, trying to understand our ecosystem…

nowadays its hard to understand clearly the market…. but one think is for sure: open source is here to stay and those companies know that… they are just trying to figure out how to deal with (some companies are understanding it faster than others).

my final point is about interaction: here in brazil we are experiencing a new era of technical events. events that bring to the same place java, .net, ruby, python, c++, php and others, aside that  jokes got funnier, people respect each other and more: learn from each other! yes! we learn from each other…. 'cos, in the end of the day, we are all geeks/nerds/developers… we have problems to solve, the language is just a tool. and when you have all those different people in the same place sharing experience (java and .net for instance) you see that they choose different paths in their career but, usually, both have the same wills and needs. and this message (interaction) those companies are getting! interact with open source community is becoming vital (do you remember that visual basic developers enabled microsoft expand windows adoption?)… in a sense we, developers, are important drivers of the technology scenario… and as developers we use to love (or should) open source…

i hope that this post helped you understand a bit about open source… at least what it is and what its not.

that is it for now, i'll blog more about this theme soon ;)

cheers!

one of the most frequent question that people use to ask me about nosql is: what is the best nosql tool that enables me start with using my programming language (java, .net, php, python, etc..)? its almost impossible to have a quick answer 'cos it involves many things like: data-model, durability and usage scenario (single node, qty of nodes or cloud setup), language binding and easy to setup.

during this post i'll try to answer this question as succinct and objective as i can. this post is divided into 4 sections that will guide you to the answer ;) – one important point that i'll not cover during this post is the administration of those tools, but definitely is a really important thing to keep in mind when you select any tool.

note that this post is written for beginner not for dummies ;)

data model

once we start to talk about data storage (nosql or not) we need to think about our needs… these needs enables us to model our data. and here is the first thing that you need to understand: a nosql can be schemaless (in fact they are more schemalast but this is a theme for other blog post) but you still need to model your data!

when talking about data modeling into nosql space… it varies a lot. if you're using a document oriented solution you need to model your documents, if you gonna use a key-value tool… your design is completely different the same happens with graphs or tabular solutions. second tip: as less resources you have.. its more difficult to model (ie. key-value is harder than documents), this tip can be a bit polemic (i'll try to cover this theme on a new blog post).

data manipulation

in tha same time that you are analysing your data to model, you need to think about your data manipulation needs. if you need a really flexible ad-hoc query engine… key-value is not for you! mongodb would be a better solution.

queries are usually easy to execute on documents or graphs. using key-value you can just query a key. and most common tabular solutions are also based just on keys (the returned data will be collection of columns).

usage scenario 

the third point that you should understand when thinking about nosql tool is your usage scenario (if you just wanna play with and are not think about delivery anything.. you could escape this step, but it's good to understand it anyway).

if you plan to use it in a single machine (what we call single node) you should not choose solutions that durability is based on data replica (like mongodb or riak). if are planning to deploy your solution into the cloud.. you should care if you're planning to use a graph database because its really hard to scale out this kind of data structure.

now it's time to choose

after considering the above points, you are almost ready to select your nosql tool. what's missing? its necessary to know if the tools that you are looking for has a driver to your language (or, if there is no driver, if you can still access it using, for instance, http).

i tried to create a table that shows the most important/used/twitter/commented nosql tools available that are easy to setup. there are lot's of other tools (probably i'm missing several ones here) but to start with it's easier to have a small list to choose.

other important thing to keep in mind: you nosql tool does not necessarily should be developed using your preferred language. as we don't select mysql, postgres, oracle or sql server 'cos they were written using a specific language… pick the one that fits your needs – specially you from .net ;) !

i'm writing an article for java magazine that will cover more deeply all these aspects giving examples on how to model data or how identify your usage scenarios. that's it! i hope that this post help you start with nosql ;)

special thanks for my tech reviewer @feuteston ;)

cheers!

note: there are so many drivers to these projects, i just picked one (alleatory) that you can start with. to check other drivers you can google it or check the project website.

before write specifically about nosql track, i have to say that #tdc2010 was a huge and successful event, probably one of the most important in brazilian technology event's calendar, i think that jorge diz (coordinator of test track) defined well the event as the woodstock of the i.t. which bringed to the same place lot's of developers from different clans (java, .net, ruby and python just to mention the languages). i'm so proud to be part of that organization… the event enabled connections that would be almost impossible in traditional events that usually are focused on just one language or environment (what unfortunately promote clans) – those new connections will enable all of us expand our current networking. kudos for globalcode and all tdc coordinators.

now i'll write about the #nosql track: it was sooooooo cool! we started our track at the main auditorium, which were webcasted (with hundreds watching the presentations at their home across the country and, in some cases, in different countries!). i think one great point that we had at nosql track was the connections between the talks… each talk contributed to the next in terms of concepts and tools.

the first talk mauricio de diana helped us understand a bit of the concepts behind the nosql buzzword, explained to us (using simple words) things like acid vs. base, cap theorem and many other things. the next talk john presented to us a comparison between some (most important/used) nosql technologies available, this approach gave to the audience a great overview of those tools.

just after the john's presentation we had to leave the auditorium and move to our room to watch gleicon show us his "pet project" (in fact this particular tool is in production in several projects that he conducts) called restmq (a rest based message queue) that uses redis as its default backend, one nice thing about gleicon's presentations is that all of them are focused on real usage scenarios (solutions for our day-by-day problems… not focused on solutions of problems that just huge traffic web sites has). one observation here is that gleicon was "competing" with josé valim (just to remember you josé valim is core developer of rails and is direct involved on rails 3 development) talk at main auditorium (from ruby track) and even facing this concurrency gleicon kept the room crowded – kudos for gleicon! after gleicon we had a pause for lunch.

after lunch we had my presentation about graph databases, a theme that i love and few people are talking about (if you like the theme and have some experience with that, contact me you may be presenting your experience in our next event). during my talk i presented few concepts behind graphs and showed how we can, easily, manipulate graphs. i also presented openspotlight as real example (outside social network world) on how graph databases can be used to model as a real application. the last talk of the track (after that we would have light talks about real cases here in brazil) was from edmar ferreira talking about big data, edmar has a broad and privileged view of the theme as main editor of escalabilidade.com web site (a web site focused on high scalability technologies/solutions). he presented to us how easy is to start on this area and also gave to us several examples (from medicine, social-network to entertainment industry). after big data presentation we started with the nosql cases session.

one important point which enables people (and mainly companies) adopt a technology is: cases. worldwide cases are the first thing that people care about.. and nosql cases around the world are easy to find (digg, twitter, foursquare, facebook, etc..). but after the worldwide cases… people look for local cases! local cases are the real enabler to technology adoption, 'cos it shows to people that someone near them are working on that (and if there is people working on that it's easier to get help or contract people to work with).

we had 6 local cases in different areas: start-ups (web or not), open source project, enterprise and worldwide institution. the first case was presented by vladimir rocha that showed us how his company are using cassandra to discovery video content (based on sound recognition), than we had the boo-box case presented by felipe vieira explanning to us how redis are helping them to scale their web site without expending tons of money (after adoption redis they could disconnect 2 dedicated machines from their cloud setup). the next case was presented by mauricio maia, a well know hacker that also worked at boo-box, his presentation showed us how he is using mongodb with geolocation in his new product topical.

the next session of use cases started with luis fernando teston presenting our case (i work with him)  implementing polyglot persistence. after teston we had a presentation from julio viegas that told us how spc (a huge and traditional company that provided consumer protection service) is implementing cassandra. to finish the day luciano presented to us how bireme is using nosql started 20 years ago and he shared a bit their needs/problems.

so… that it! in summary this was our track! here are the links for the presentations:

• nosql: perdas & ganhos (mauricio de diana)
• nosql dev_ops #fail? (john d. rowell)
• restmq – message queue com nosql (gleicon moraes)
• graph databases (alexandre porcelli)
• a era do big data: explorando oportunidades na era da abundância de dados (edmar ferreira)
• cases
  • on-air audio finder usando cassandra (vladimir rocha / twitterless, his presentation has email contact)
  • redis na boo-box (felipe vieira)
  • topical – geolocalização com mongodb e rails (maurício maia)
  • persistência poliglota (luiz fernando teston)
  • adotando nosql no ambiente corporativo do spc (júlio viegas)
  • nosql na bireme/opas/oms: 20 anos de experiência (luciano ramalho)

and here are some photos from nosql track:

to finish this post i'd like to thank once more to globalcode team that first had the courage to give-up of their total control of the event and invite some mad people (like me) to coordinate the tracks, i'm also grateful for all the presenters, a special thanks goes to valdir and edson that helped me as volunteers all day long at #nosql track, and my main thanks goes to all the attendees of nosql track and other tracks that stayed at the main auditorium for the first two presentations as well all the attendees that were watching via webcast.

cheers!

after a long period without blogging…. i'm back ;) – this time i'll post about a great event that will be held here in são paulo: the developer's conference. this is the 4th edition of this, already traditional, event that this year will happen on august 20-22 (friday to sunday) and i'm here blogging to announce (in fact to publicize) that we'll have an exclusive track covering nosql technologies.

the developer's conference is an already well know event organized by globalcode and for this 4th edition  they decided, once more, to innovate: they created the concept of several events inside one. let me explain: the event has several tracks and each one is organized and coordinated by a different organization/person (ie. i'm in charge of nosql).

so… we going to have 13 tracks (yes… 13!)… all of then dedicated to developers in a broad sense, independent of technology or platforms – everything in just one place. here are the tracks:

i was invited to coordinate a nosql track.. and just after accept the invite i started to think about how it should look like… and for me, create a new "event" about nosql, is a big responsibility due the success that we had in the previous event.

my first decision was: it should be completely different of no:sql(br) meetup(too obvious?! its really difficult not repeat yourself after a success!). we should have a different content, diffrent talks, and to create this new agenda, i've been talking to several people during the last weeks. people that are using nosql and have a "solid" background (for a really new technologies) around it and, i hope, i could create a nice agenda again ;)

if you joined the no:sql(br) meetup or are interested in nosql, you should, at least, take a look at our agenda here. an advice: if you are interested you should make your reservation now! (we have limited seats for each track and we already have sold out tracks… and nosql is almost there!).

so… that's it!  hope to see you at #tdc2010!

i've been working on openspotlight at least the last 5 years of my life… it's is the ambitious and mad project that i lead. during this post i'll try to explain what it is, what it does, how it works and why its so revolutionary.

to understand openspotlight you should first be an information technology related professional (cio, cto, manager, lead, architect, developer, intern, student, etc..) – if your aren't…. what hell are you doing here? go visit some other fancy web site!

i'll start this post from the beginning duh!?, answering the first question that you may had asked yourself: what openspotlight is? simple: its is a semantic search engine for information technology!

what hell is that? i use to explain openspotlight as "a google for information technology" – in fact it's more than that, as we are talking about semantics a better phrase would be: "a google for information technology that besides indexing, it keeps tracking of how all indexed data are related".

in more formal words we can say that: openspotlight automatically scans/reads artifacts from across the enterprise, records the relationships between them in a knowledge base accessible thought services or an web console.

at this point you may be wondering… what it indexes (what hell are those artifacts)? how openspotlight does this? how it works?

information technology is a broad term, a search engine to attend it should involve a lot of different sources of information and this is the first openspotlight challenge – index all information technology related data that includes (but not limited to): source codes of different languages and platforms, database schemas from different vendors, configuration files, documents, services, components and, besides this software related assets, we may include infrastructure/network data like: servers, switches, storages and etc.

with all these sources of information indexed (what i, from now, will reference then just as artifacts), openspotlight can calculate the entire matrix of dependence, allowing thus:

• code changes with total security and guarantee that they would not impact the operation of the software/services involved;
• best estimate of the dates to promote changes and management thereof;
• know the complexity degree of the codes through metrics automatically calculated;
• track dependencies between systems and infrastructure;
• information technology self-knowledge;

now you know what openspotlight index (what artifacts are) and what you can do with the indexed information… let's understand how openspotlight index those artifacts.

the indexing process in openspotlight is much more than a linguistic indexing (keywords, most used words or other related strategy), our indexing process is based on semantic analysis, wich means that every artifact is analysed as a whole and how it behaves in the environment.

every artifact is completely dissected in two different and complementary aspects: internal and external. in internal aspect we analyse how the artifact is defined and what it defines (extracting things like how many lines of code it has or which methods and fields it declares) and in external aspect we try to explore how this artifact is related to the environment: which other artifacts it uses, how it uses, what this artifact exposes, how it is exposed and many others considerations…. as you can see our indexing strategy is very accurate and this is one of the strengths of openspotlight.

at this point you already got, i expect so, what openspotlight does/index, now i'll tell you how openspotlight scans the artifacts.

in openspotlight core we have three key modules: repository, services and federation engine. repository and services are related to already indexed data: repository is where we store indexed data and services are the way we expose then. on the other side the federation engine is responsible to interface/interact with the environment that should be "scanned".

the federation engine is responsible to create the inventory (keep tracking of all the artifacts that should be indexed by openspotlight). this engine has a configuration file (xml at this point) that you, the user, points all your sources of information (scm's, databaseses, system folders, cmdb's, etc…) and based on these sources, the federation engine knows what it needs to index.

federation engine has a bit of intelligence – it executes what we call "delta actions", that, in simple words, is the process that the engine just update the changes since last indexing process. so during the first time the federation scans everything and the next indexing it just scans what has changed (included, deleted or updated artifacts).

ohh wait! so… openspotlight is not a magic technology? do we need to point where are the data?? yes! there is no magic on openspotlight! our federation engine associated with our artifact indexers are the technologies that guarantee that openspotlight repository reflects your i.t. environment.

that's it… most of openspotlight concepts i already presented here… now i'll finish this post with: why openspotlight is so revolutionary and why it will change your life!

there are many reasons, but i'll point here the most important one (in my point of view): you have all data related to your information technology environment in just one place and you can trust on that (it wasn't generated manually)!

so.. every time that you need to find anything related to i.t. you can just use openspotlight and it will give to you exactly what you need (or something really close to that) and more… it will enables you explore those connections!

and the information stored on openspotlight repository benefits all information technology roles: from cio to developers. cio and top managers can create indicators about the environment (openspotlight extracts several metrics during indexing), team leaders can estimate better the impact of a change or a adding a new feature, architects can understand much more easier how the environment is connected and how the data flow, infrastructure team can understand how their hardware interacts with the systems that are running inside and developers can see, in advance, what is the impact of their changes or understand better how a component works before starting a maintenance task.

in compliment the above points i'd add this: we already have a search engine culture installed in our society (google is the most accessed website in most every place in the world), this points that you do not have to care about openspotlight adoption in your company, it'll occurs naturally because our culture motivates it!

in resume: with openspotlight everybody wins! and here i present my last point, the cherry on top of the cake: openspotlight is an open source project! you can see how it works, you can contribute to it, you can just download and start using it*.

well, there is just one problem (*): openspotlight is not available yet for broad public (now we just selected few chosen) – we're working hard to make it available soon (i hope believe that in few months we can delivery an easy to setup solution).

so… if you wanna more information about openspotlight… you can follow me on twitter @porcelli or contact me if you have any question about openspotlight – feel free to send me your questions – it will help us build a nice faq ;)

ps: i'm planning two other blog posts, one focused on our repository structure and another one that will describe how technically openspotlight works and is architected.

during this post i'll try to express my point of view about first nosql meetup here in brazil – i'll write about organization and community traction as well as the event history, the challenges, problems, numbers, improvements and future plans.

in general…

i'll start this post with my general impression of the event: it was a huge success! i'm proud of it… and one of the most important thing that happened for me on that saturday (may 15th 2010) was the ability to bring people from different areas (rails, python, java, c++, agile, etc…) to the same place to talk and share thoughts! in complement with that we had 200 people attending the event and all of then really interested in the subject (during the talks people didn't leave the room and several guys were taking notes) – just awesome!

so let's start from the beginning… the idea

[in my previous post you can understand how i became interested and involved on "nosql world"]

during one of my talks with feu teston about how to implement some really complex stuff using nosql technologies… i got a click and i asked him: "what do you think about a nosql meetup here in são paulo? i'm aware of this movement here in brazil, we need to talk about this technology with other smart people"… he, as usual, got excited! "yes.. would be amazing!"… and in that moment i just tweeted that (here in portuguese)… minutes later several friends (followers) that liked the idea started to retweet… and, in that moment, was born the meetup.

as a bunch of friends liked the idea… i pushed myself to be in charge of that… and, as several friends were involved, i thought that would be fair to ask then what would be the best date for it… to do that i created a poll and published a new tweet.

in the mean time i started to look for a place to accommodate my friends (my expectations at that moment was around 20 people, max 40!) and started to plan the happy hour - the most important part of the event ;).

i called some companies and one of than, acctiva, opened their doors to us supporting even the coffee break… so with that i could confirm the date (as i had the place), now i just had to create a website for the event.

to create the website, i contacted the organization of nosqleu.com asking to use their website design, once more, using twitter - after some days later they allowed me to use their design (they answered to me via twitter).

in the meantime… i contracted the hosting and bought the nosqlbr.com domain. once i got the answer from nosqleu.com i started to prepare the website during my free time… in few days i got the website done and published it (allowing people to register) and started to spread the message with a new tweet.

in about 2 hours i had more than 40 registered attendees, but most of then were close friends.. i didn't care that much – and i had nothing to worry about once i knew that free events in brazil have 50%-60% of no-show! so… no problem at all

but…. in the end of the next day.. i had around 100 registered users.. and in that moment i realized that i was in trouble….

lots of people… now i have a challenge

wow! nice… people are interested in talk/listen about nosql! great! – this was my first reaction… but people around (wife, family, friends, …) were pushing me to stop the registration… i didn't have a place to accommodate more than 50 people! 100 already registered people + speakers… reach 100 people in the conference seemed to be a reality.

so… in that moment i decided that: i would not stop the registration! if lots of people wants to go to that event talk about a "new" technology movement… i would not stop that!

people started to say that i was totally insane (really?! i didn't realized that until they say that…. :D; ps: check this blog title and subtitle ;) ) – people were complaining about me that i should stop the registering.. in less than 2 weeks were impossible to setup an event for ??? (in that moment i had no idea how much people to expect… we just had 1 day of registration)… but nobody could convince me! i had my decision… the event would be bigger.. we just need to find a new place.

and i gave this impossible mission for a person that is specialist in resolve my troubles (during all my life long): mon! she is not just my mon, she controls the financials of my startup (and it's not coincidence that she and my father are my partners in my startup ;) ) and she is the best negotiator that a i know… so it was a perfect job for her… after some days of hard working to find a place (i didn't know, but during may we have lots of event here in sao paulo)… she found a hotel (after call more than 60 different hotels/places)…

but it would cost around US$ 6000… (remember, she controls the money!)… she called me and asked: "what i do?", i answered "make the deal", she immediately asked "and about the money? how do you plan to handle that?", and i answered: "i don't know… but make the deal… and later i'll try to resolve it."… and this is how we could find a place to host our nosqlbr event!

ok.. everything its ok… just missing a small detail: money ;)

with a cost of U$6000, the first thing that came in my mind was: ask for sponsorship (my subconscience were telling me: give up man! in 2 week you will never get it!).

in that moment i started to send emails to people close to me or companies that use to support (in some way) tech events… i sent several emails… one nice surprise that i had was that, almost immediately, i got a positive feedback from caelum and few days later from globalcode… both would help (but with minimum quota) – thats ok… better than nothing.. 2 days before the event i called a closed friend that is cofounder of a really nice company in salvador (detail: the event was hosted in sao paulo) and he agreed to sponsor with the minimum quota too… at this moment i got less than US$ 2000… and it was everything that i could get from sponsors…

ps: i'm not complaining about not get sponsorships enough… to be honest i didn't believe that i could get anything!

10gen found me! how?!….

in the meantime, getting a new place and talking to companies about sponsorship, a girl from nowhere contacted me via twitter. i checked who she was… and surprise: she was from 10gen (if you don't know yet… 10gen is the company behind mongodb).

i sent to her an email telling about our meeting (now we had a bigger meetup ;) ) and she answered to me telling that she could send a mongodb engineer, a brazilian guy who, before join 10gen, had also worrked for google on bigtable… i got really excited and told her that he would be really welcomed to our meetup!

ps: i also asked her if they could sponsor our meetup (more than once), but she told me that there isn't enough time to do that and this time she could contribute only with their engineer (of course that they were already supporting a lot!).

now forget about the money… just try to be as honest as possible

after all the nightmare trying to find some money (that i couldn't) i positioned myself as much honest as i could, i created a pledgie compaign and started to ask contributions, of course, using twitter – and to my surprise, people started to contribute!

the day before… a great lunch to relax

one day before the event, i asked alberto lerner (10gen engineer) if he would like to have lunch, and he accepted. it was an amazing talk! really interesting… we talked about a lot of things, here are some: who and how much attendees were expected, brazil market (usa point of view), technologies, nosql (duh!), databases (yes! he loves data and he likes databases), life outside brazil, startups, brazilian economy and much more…

this lunch was perfect… besides the fact that the food is amazing on fogo de chão (steak house/barbecue+all you can eat) the talk was amazing.. so great that i left the lunch totally relaxed, not even thinking about the next day.

the big day!

wow… the day before was long (i expected just relax after the lunch but…) i just finished my presentation about 2am!… i had to wake up at 6:30… after all done (shower and breakfast) we, me and my wife, arrived at hotel around 7:30am.

when i arrived my parents were already there – and here is good to mention that i invited my family to help me during the event (filling the badges, checking coffee break, printing stuff and etc..) – and to my surprise, at that time of a saturday morning, people started to arrive (man, it was 7:30am!!).

around 8:20 (10 minutes to start officially the meetup) we had around 100 attendees in the room waiting my opening (in fact waiting for the other lectures)… i started 8:30 and tried to keep the schedule (what usually is really hard!).

my opening was a short talk (less than 30 minutes) followed by gleicon – a really fun talk about sql anti-patterns. at that moment i started to care about a lot of things (timing, people arriving, etc.. ) and this is the main reason that i can't write about the talks itself (if you want a better description of the talks the last section of this post has several external references about the event).

during the morning we had the first coffee break, i was impressed by the quality of that (for a free meetup!) – really high quality, kudos for my family once more… they arranged that with hotel.

after coffee break  flávia jobstraibizer, linux magazine editor, arrived to cover the event! (i think this was the time that i understood the meetup dimension). we had a great talk about tech news and about the linuxconf (a huge event!)…

so… in the main room we had more talks after break (most occurred when i was talking to flávia) and then another break to lunch, attendees had 1h30m to have lunch and came back… and for my surprise (it was a day full of surprises!) people arrived on time!

there is an episode that i'd like to write here: when people were coming back from lunch a guy, from nowhere, started to talk to me and asking how i did that, how i was supporting the event and many other questions… this guy was henrique bastos (a guy that impressed me during all day long about his amazing point of view on how interact and build communities!). he liked the history and started a new website to help support ($) the event (he lost the first talk after lunch working on new website for donations!)…

as i planned, just before start the first talk after lunch, i got the mic and asked people to donate… to help support the meetup… and in that moment henrique came to the stage got the mic from my hands and started to tell people what i had to do to setup the event… it was a inflamed speech! when i got back the mic i just couldn't talk at all.. i was emotionally touched! (and in that time people asked me to take off my hat to enable then to contribute with real money there! so at end we could collect around US$ 540 in donation just in the hat :D).

so.. this was the atmosphere of the event… really awesome! people exchanging thoughts… people from different areas interacting…

at end of the day i had planned a panel to discuss how better use nosql technologies… but we preferred to do an unconference… and everybody (audience and speakers) could talk and expose ideas.

so… it was about 7pm and most of us were already tired… and we finished the event and start to think about happy hour ;)

after the event…. a well deserved happy hour!

just after the event…. me and fellow went to a bar near hotel – there we could drink lots of beers and talk about almost everything (computer languages, soccer, friendship, events, collaboration, community and even philosophy)… it was really fun and a great time to relax after couple stressed weeks.

the problems… yes we had some :(

for me the biggest problem was around internet connection! the hotel has a vex connection but during all day long vex wasn't working!

i know that some (or most) people doesn't have a vex account, but if it worked people could pay for a day use… next time i'll check the connection one day before.

other important problem that happened also was the sound and video system that wasn't good for me, the projector was too bright and the sound some times failed… next time: test it one day before!

and the most idiot problem: lack of official photos – i didn't remember to take pictures! i left my camera at home! until now i'm asking myself how i could do that!!!! what a stupid thing… next time i'll bring my camera and try to take lots of pictures. (if you took any picture of the event, please contact me!).

i think these were the most important ones… if you have any suggestion or critics please, contact me!

now…… the meetup numbers!

• US$ 6000 for total cost
• US$ 1350 that i'll need to pay from my savings
• 400 registers
• 200 attendees during the day – 50% of noshow
• 171 attendees at event room in the same time
• 10 speakers
• 4 states represented
• 3 sponsors
• 1 organizer (and his family)

next steps… better: next events!

during the nosql opening, i mentioned my intention to setup some other events. i plan to do (in the same format of nosqlbr) a meetup about emerging languages and dsl (disclaimer: i didn't create it.. this event will occur during oscon) – as parsing is my specialization, this is an event that i'm much more experienced on the subject that i was on nosql and i hope that people are interested on that too.

during my email exchange with 10gen, they asked if i could help than to setup a mongodb meetup by the end of the year… and, of course, i accepted it ;) – hope to get news about it soon ;)

on monday after the meetup i had a chat with alê gomes (a friend of mine) and he proposed to me another event… a subject that i'm really interested! to complement that i'm also thinking to bring to brazil another event but for now this is just a plan… may be just next year.

as you can see… i'm involved with some other events ;) – my personal challenge here is to be engaged on these events and try to affect as less as possible my daily work.

ps: if you are interested in setup a nosql meetup in your city… contact me – i may help you with something ;). i'm already planning few local meetups that i plan to write about soon ;).

ops… almost forgetting: next meetup date

ohhh this is really important! at end of event i announced the second meetup that will be on march 2011. now i think i have enough time to plan and ask for sponsorship (i hope to stay with free event).

conclusion

my conclusion is simple: i need/have to do more events like this! now i have some experience… i need to plan better the next ones.. but i need to keep this community environment! it was amazing the collaboration! people open to new ideas… new technologies… no flamewars… no exclusions… nothing bad to say!

and this kind of event "from community to community", is the type of events that i want keeping promoting… i hope to keep the cost as lower as possible (at the same time offering a good environment to attendees) and promote this culture of exchange.

other blog posts about nosqlbr

these are more impartial posts about the nosqlbr:

• http://henriquebastos.net/2010/05/17/balanco-do-nosqlbr (pt-br)
• http://blog.globalcode.com.br/2010/05/nosqlbreu-fui-e-estava-sensacional.html (pt-br)
• http://ensinar.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/encontro-nosqlbr-eu-fui (pt-br)
• http://escalabilidade.com/2010/05/19/como-foi-o-1%C2%BA-encontro-nosql-brasil (pt-br)
• http://pedromenezes.com/como-foi-o-encontro-nosql-brasil (pt-br)
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/scalone/sets/72157623976875549 (pt-br)
• http://zenmachine.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/sql-antipatterns-and-nosqlbr (en)
• http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/608082272/nosql-brasil-recap (en)
• http://feuteston.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/nosqlbr-meeting-awesome (en)
• http://www.jboss.org/feeds/post/jboss_technologies_presented_at_1st_nosqlbr (en)
• (contact me if you wrote something and whant to be listed here)

here is how i got involved with nosql…

i'm project lead of an open source project called openspotlight and one of the main characterists of this project is to handle large volumes of data that are created dynamicaly (no predefined schema), to add a bit more of madness, this large volume can vary based on information technology client's department size (some small companies can generate few gigabytes, medium companies can generate hundreds gigabytes and big companies can generate terabytes easily).

in the beginning of our project history we started using relational databases but, of course, it couldn't feet our needs. later we tried jcr (java content repository) a java standard that describes an hierarchy repository – jcr was amazing in the beginning, we did several tests around it (including some "stress tests", that later we could see that wasn't stressed enught) but after months working on that we realized that jcr couldn't feet our needs too (it couldn't handle our volume of data in a acceptable performance).

before starting to look to other technologies we started to think in a better solution, in fact a portable solution, that would enable openspotlight to use any kind of persistent mechnism in a plugable way (enabling us customize our software to feet our customer needs)… and in that point we decide to start to model the data that we need (don't carying about technology implementation). after a real hard work we had a formal data model (and believe me its wasn't that easy).

with our data model (much more than simple pojos) in hands we started to think wich technologies we should use (in the meantime we were studying about nosql: redis, couchdb, mongodb, cassandra, hbase, etc..) and how enable these technologies to be plugged in a easy to setup way – other important point was not limitate our needs based on a minimum common set of funcionalities of nosql technologies (the "simple to setup technology" requirement is really important for us now and its the reason why we are excluding hbase for now).

so we started with, what in my opinion, is the "simplest" solution: redis. redis is amazing product but its simple (its a feature not a problem!). with redis limitations we could prove that our complex scenarious could be done using more "advanced" solutions.

now we are still in progress with this madness but we are really excited about our actual results, our next step is mondogb.

ps: we plan also use tio (a nosql made in brazil), but strauss needs to work on java driver ;)

ps2: most of these experiments were executed by feu teston a friend and openspotlight core developer that also lives in this wonderland.

i've been pushed by several friends ( feuteston, salaboy and many others) to start blogging… and, until now, i used to have two standard answears: i do not have any interesting thing to write about or i'll start it soon.. just after [put some really important task here].

and what changed now?

in fact nothing… i still think that i do not have a lot of things to write about, but i'll try to express here my thoughts, feelings and demonstrate what i'm working on for all you – probably just my wife (that will read to fix my mistakes) and few employees (to have something to talk about with their boss) :D.

to know more about me, you should first read my about page, that describes me a bit and to know what i'm doing is good you take a look on openspotlight web site.

the title of this blog "porcelli's adventures in wonderland" is, of course, based on lewis carroll book: alice's adventures in wonderland. my family and some close friends use to say that i live in a parallel world – in fact i think i do – in my world i do not work, i have fun! in my world i do not need money (ok… just a bit :D – enought to me continue with my dream)! in my world we do not need to fight against anything, we can convience! in my world there is no tech movements, just one that spread our passion about technologies! in my world there is no bareers, i can work and comunicate with anybody in any place in any time! so, this is my wonderland… wellcome!

ps: i like money, i'm not comunist or anything related, but i think that my dream is more important that anything: including money.