Headed on the train up to NYC to attend Strata, which is a BigData + Hadoop conference. Looking forward to sessions on Spark, as well as getting exposure to other open source platforms which might be of interest to my company or to its clients. And, of course, interested in making contacts that help us either hire more people or enter into new business areas – particularly those that have fewer barriers to entry to bringing on people!

That’s the blend of things that go into my idea of a successful conference visit. I should come away with some 3-5 contacts that make sense to follow up with, post conference, and should find 2-3 things that I hadn’t previously really been exposed to. Oh, and I should be able to come away with some sort of themes of the event – folks were talking about topicY moreso than topicX, or the main thrust of the birds of the feathers sessions aligned or didn’t align with what I saw in the curated conference speaker topics. And somehow fit in a bit of wandering around the expo to see if there’s a commercial offering that makes sense to track or compare the open-source world to – some killer feature or ease of use bundling or new infrastructure or platform as a service offering to experiment with.

After the event, I’ll put together a summary – intent is to post it here, as well as make it available through our corporate LinkedIn page. Nerdery publicly shared!