Heads Down, Thumbs Up

May 01, 2012 - San Francisco, CA

If you have been following this blog at all, you have probably left by now. But for those of you still around (and those new!) here’s a little explaination as to the recent gap in posts.

At the end of January 2012 I started working at Salesforce.com on the team dedicated to bringing HBase to one of the world’s foremost CRM software providers. Despite being a large company, they are still incredibly agile. Further, I get to spend almost everyday working on a project (HBase) that I used to work on for fun. On top of that my team is top-notch. And we are running real code, that impacts real people and makes a difference everyday.

Some people say they have great jobs, but I have the best job (and snacks!). Here is the view from my window:

San Francisco Ferry Building and Treasure Island - Salesforce HQ: 1 Market Street

This post was not meant to be an explicit plug for Salesforce.com, but we are hiring.

Also, in the meantime, I’ve picked up my marathon training (following this great book: [Run Less, Run Faster] (http://www.amazon.com/Runners-World-Less-Faster-Revolutionary/dp/159486649X)) and am doing 30-40 mi of running a week with cross-training via cycling (fixie or raod bike, depending on the day) and yoga at [Planet Granite] (http://www.planetgranite.com); I’m also starting to get back into climbing now that my finger has healed from a trip to Bishop, CA earlier this month and a two year long fight with tendonitis. This isn’t an excuse, merely the reasons behind being more busy of late.

Oh, and I also just moved into a new apartment in Lower Haight with a few great guys. Tons of space, peek-a-boo view of downtown, good landlord and quiet neighbors; pretty much what everyone is looking for in an apartment (and crazy low rent). This means I’ve been spending an exhorbinant amount of time doing things for my aparment; its mostly little things or massive Ikea runs, but time sinks nonetheless.

And in the rest of my free time I’ve been working as much as I on HBase. Its been a couple months, but the code is just starting to come together on a lot of these Jira issues. For those interested, here are the main things I’ve been working on:

  • [HBase-50] (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-50) - Snapshots (also the longest standing ticket in HBase)
  • [HBase-5547] (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-5547) - Get a reference to a table in the shell
  • [HBase-4336] (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-4336) - Convert HBase into maven modules
  • [HBase-5548] (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-5548) - Don’t delete HFiles in backup mode

So its been a bit busy. Sorry. I’m going to try and be better about it. There is a list of things I’ve been wanting to talk about, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Here is what I have planned (I’ll attempt to remember to add links here as they are written):

  • using table references in HBase shell
  • tips and tricks for using maven in multi-module projects
  • philosophical discussion on why money is not an indicator of a person’s value, but seems to be all we have
  • use and the design of hfile backups - code for this is nearly done, and the only gating factor in my writing
  • using HBase snapshotting (and a second post on the architecture) - have to wait until the code is done for this

Definitely some stuff to look forward to, you know, if your into that kind of thing.

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