Looking for a passion for Ruby, cloud and big data

Back in 2010…

…Antonio was announcing that IBM was looking for top notch student hackers.

After a process that provided many skill-building lessons, Henrique and myself joined the team at the IBM Toronto Software Lab.

Today…

…it's time again to look for the right attitude and for a matching potential.
We are looking for 2 students that are passionate about technology and their craft!

I am biased but I believe that these are the best positions that a computer science student can want. Since I flew in straight from Romania, I grew in an Agile environment with Ruby and Rails—from zero to deployment—with cloud computing, big data and related technologies.
Our team is best described as a "Startup within IBM". You get the best of both worlds: a highly challenging environment where you get to try to do absolutely everything and a stable environment where you can focus on developing great ideas without being distracted by the instability of a startup.

If…

• you are keen on using bleeding edge technologies
• you have a hacker mentality
• you are willing to work in a start-up like setting but enjoy stability and resources of a leading technology company

then you will gain experience that is unmatched. You will work hand in hand with some of the best talent in the industry architecting and building the coolest tech. Oh, and this internship is for a period of 16 months, and yes: it's a paid internship.

If you are looking for a rewarding challenge, and if your eyebrow raised in a positive way while reading till here, please get in touch (marius dot butuc at ca dot ibm dot com gmail dot com) and tell me a bit about yourself. I will provide you with the information on how to apply through the official IBM channels and we'll take it from there.

Expand and Update your BigInsights

Roughly a year ago, you were reading about how MIT was harvesting big insights from big data, about discovering useful information by turning huge amounts of data into gists that are visually understandable. At that time, I was also in awe of IBM's Watson and how InfoSphere BigInsights is used to create a Smarter Planet.

But that was a year ago... Since then, many things happened.
On the Open Source side, the components integrated in the BigInsights platform experienced a consistent progress; take Hadoop for instance, who matured enough to reach version 1.0.
Meanwhile, InfoSphere BigInsights grew just as much: last Friday releasing BigInsights version 1.4. A nice tradition I wish other companies would copy from IBM is that the BigInsights v1.4 GA was simultaneous to its availability for deployment on public clouds: anyone can create their own Hadoop cluster (based on BigInsights v1.4) on the Cloud in less than 30 minutes.

BigInsights v1.4 available for deployment on public clouds

The very same day, the 61 participants at the Big Data Developer Day hands-on labs used BigInsights v1.4 — delivered via Cloud instances.

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The new version brings simple administration and management capabilities, rich developer tools, powerful analytic functions, up-to-date Apache Hadoop and associated projects, as well as many enterprise features and enhancements. The new capabilities are aimed to improving flexibility, consumability, and manageability.
Here are some updates I cherry-picked based on my interests and needs:

Update to open source component levels

Here are the new versions of the open source components shipped with BigInsights 1.4:

• Hadoop 1.0.0
• Flume 0.9.4
• HBase 0.90.5
• Hive 0.8.0
• Oozie 2.3.1
• Nutch 1.4
• Pig 0.9.1
• Zookeeper 3.3.4

Consumability and Usability

• Text analytics development: Provide an enhanced user experience for developing text analytics applications, with improved navigation of result views, enhanced sorting and filtering, enhanced pattern discovery and progress reporting.
• Developer tools: Better built-in support for text analytics, support for local mode map-reduce development, improved deployment of applications, and automatic creation of JDBC connections to Hive data sources.
• BigSheets and web console: New chart customization features make it effortless to access and manipulate data the way you want. New sheets, macros, and readers make it possible to access more data and analyze it in new ways, giving you more control and improved browsing capabilities for HDFS and NFS files. The addition of new application input parameter types make applications even easier to run.

Flexibility

Version 1.4 of InfoSphere BigInsights brings support for Cloudera Distributions of Apache Hadoop (CDH). This allows enterprises to either run BigInsights with the IBM provided Apache Hadoop distribution or to deploy to a Cloudera CDH cluster. On the other hand, Cloudera CDH users can now take advantage of enterprise-class features such as text analytics, user-friendly data manipulation and exploration, and developer tools available in BigInsights.

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If you want to join the Big Data Developer Day participants, you might want to get a
first-hand experience by either getting the free version — InfoSphere BigInsights Basic Edition or whet your appetite with the Hadoop and Big Data courses on BigDataUniversity.com.