So, our october’s tour is over, and the last stop has been the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. There was a last minute planned stop in Ludwigsburg (Germany) where one of our founders, Jesús, flight to the EclipseCon for some meetings.
How was the OpenStack Summit?
It has been challenging and amazing. It has been the first time we have a booth as a company in an event like this, and even with a big roll-up!
Many people came to the booth asking for what we do, and so many were surprised about our software development analytics not only for the dashboards themselves but for the kind of answers that metrics can provide about how a large community project is going on different areas. There has been very good feedback about our Open Data strategy, our bet on providing not only the charts but the data for the analysis, so anyone could repeat it, or even to create their own ones.
Another important point has been to show the Free / Open Source software we are collaborating on, mostly developed by us, but spread around to build a community over it:
- MetricsGrimoire, as set of tools for communty sofwtare development information data gathering
- VizGrimoire, the tools for data anlysis (based on R project) and data visualization
On the other hand the most typical questions have been related with Big Data. Things like "are you using hadoop/mongodb/{put any nonsql or bigdata related database name currently on the hype here}?" where repeated over and over. All of this, remembers a cite from Dan Ariely:
"Big data is like teen sex. Everybody is talking about it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it"
On any case, we have considered BigData as an option for our current services, but there isn´t yet the need. Eventhough, we have some ideas for the future where the cloud and Big Data could play an important role.
Despite the several keynotes, tracks, etc. we have had the chance to speak on “Measuring OpenStack: What Activities We Track and Why” panel (you can watch it online), sharing the panel with people Dan Stagel, from HP, and Alex Freedland from Mirantis.
It was an interesting conversation about what is currently being measured in OpenStack, and what the community would like to see. The feedback and possible chance to collaborate with other companies has been important, since we are the current providers of OpenStack activity dashboard.
We are currently working in our 2014’s tour, and the first stop will be FOSDEM. Let’s meet there 😉