April 2015 Spark Meetup Notes.md

Boston Spark April 2015 Meetup

Boston Spark Community Updates

• This is Event #4 for this Meetup.
• 570+ members; Meetup started in May 2014.
• New talk format: Lightning Talks
  • 30 seconds to 5 minutes maximum.
  • Any topic relating to Spark.
  • Any skill or experience level--beginners welcome!
• Speakers: We want you!
  • Feature talks or Lighting talks
• Sponsors: You want us!
  • Host an event, pay for food and drink, or cover other event costs.
  • Take a few minutes at the start of the event to pitch your company, job, or product.
• Why are we "Spahk Enthusiasts"? Is that a typo?
  • No.

Spark Project Updates

• Spark 1.3.0 was released.

  • Major new feature is the DataFrames API.
    • Inspired by similar APIs offered by R and Python's Pandas library.
    • Give you an easy way to work with structured datasets.
    • Gives Spark much more information about the data it's working on, so it can optimize and run things even faster.

• Spark 1.3.1 and 1.2.2 are undergoing voting now. These are bug-fix releases.

• Targeted for Spark 1.4.0:

  • R language API for Spark.
    • Probably the last new language API that will be added to Spark Core. (There is, for example, a third-party Clojure API for Spark called Flambo, but that will likely remain as a third-party package.)
  • Python 3 support.

• Spark Summit East 2015 took place a few weeks ago in New York City.

Tonight's Sponsors

• Thank you to Red Hat for sponsoring our Meetup.com fees for a year!
• Thank you to Thomson Reuters for sponsoring food and drink for tonight's event!