We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …
Get to know Julien Nioche.
Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I live in Bristol, UK with my wife and 2 children. I started my own consultancy, DigitalPebble, back in 2007 and have been providing my expertise in web crawling, natural language processing, machine learning and search using open source software.
How did you get started with developing software?
Quite late. I studied Russian at uni but had always been interested in programming. I learned Java by reading books while doing my military service and later found a way of reconciling my interests in linguistics and programming when I started studying Natural Language Processing.
What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
Raise awareness of the storm-crawler project and Apache Storm in general.
Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
It will be a 20 min introduction. So I don't expect to go very deep, however people in the audience might learn a couple of useful Storm tricks and get a better understanding of the challenges of web crawling.
Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
Definitely! I was at the very first edition back in 2010 then came back in 2011 and 2013. I've always been a fan of Berlin Buzzwords and have enjoyed meeting loads of great people there over the years.
If you were the god of [You name it!] - what would you change?
Abolishing religion would be a bit dangerous for a God so I'd do something different then and be the God of weather. I'd make sure people get the message that we have only one planet and need to look after it a lot better.
When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
I contributed to Lucene back in 2002/3 in very small ways by reporting bugs and sending a few patches. My own first open source project was called LIMO and was a web app to the monitor Lucene indices.
What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
Lucene
Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
Storm-crawler, Nutch ...
Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
Nowhere specific but please do come and have a chat.
What's your favourite beer?
Berliner Weiße of course.
Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
Hard to name one place in particular, Berlin has so many different identities. What I like in Berlin is that you're always staring at History, distant or recent.
photo: Berlin Buzzwords (flickr) CC-BY-SA 2.0
