Musings on Tech

Of late, have been looking into the Big Data space and Hadoop in particular.  When I started looking into it, found that there are so many products and tools related to Haddop.   Using this post summarize my discovery about Hadoop Ecosystem. Hadoop Ecosystem A small overview on each is listed below: Data Collection  - Primary objective of these is to move data into a Hadoop cluster Flume : - Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available system for efficiently collecting, aggregating and moving large amounts of log data from many different sources to a centralized data store. Developed by cloudera and currently being incubated at Apache software foundaton. The details about the same can be found here . Scribe : Scribe is a server for aggregating streaming log data. It is designed to scale to a very large number of nodes and be robust to network and node failures. Dveloped by Facebook and can be found here .  Chuckwa : Chukwa is a Hadoop subproject dev

In the last post I talked about Gamification and different concepts behind Gamification.   In this post I intend to cover why Gamification has become important. Let us accept it.  Today we live in a world which is increasingly becoming online.  More and more businesses  are moving online and one of the prime focus for these businesses is to sustain and improve the engagement levels of its users.   Gamification acts as key driver in increasing the engagement level. Before we delve into how Gamification impacts engagement; let us try to understand what "Engagement" means.  The dictionary definition of Engagement which would applicable to this scenario will be " emotional involvement or commitment". Given this definition - the first aspect to analyze is what drives this involvement and commitment.  The generally accepted hypothesis is that it is "Motivation" that drives commitment which implies that Motivation is the key contributing factor to increa

Late last year  Deloitte released their report predicting top 10 emerging and disruptive technologies that is expected to play a crucial role in business in 2012.  Gamification was one of them. What is Gamification? Gamification is used as an umbrella term that covers game design thinking, concepts and techniques being applied to non gaming applications to make them more fun and engaging.  The basic goal of Gamification is to use gaming techniques to increase engagement of the users with the application. Gamification is not a new concept.  It has been there for a long time.   Airlines have been using Gamification techniques to attract and retain their user base through frequent flyer programs.  Many retail chains have been using Gamification concepts in their loyalty programs, etc.  But with the explosion of online retail, social media and social marketing, Gamification is becoming a strong tool to attract new customers, retain the user base, and build interesting business

From a collection of writings I wrote in 2007 when I first explored this methodology . To sum it up in one short sentence - " Scrum was abandoned ". Many might spin it the way they like, but the hard fact remains. This was really unfortunate given that the process during the initial days were adopted quite enthusiastically by everyone and many really tried to follow it to the best of their abilities. Now at the end of the release (which proved to be one of the more stress full releases), the whole SCRUM methodology - as adopted and followed by us is in shambles. It attracts no credibility among the team and everyone including yours truly is skeptical on the way ahead. At a personal level, I am very disappointed as I believed and continue to believe that Scrum offers significant advantages during the Software Development lifecycle. What attracted me and in which I still see merit are: a) The focus on doing the most important thing (biggest bang for the buck) first

From a collection of writings I wrote in 2007 when I first explored this methodology . We are almost at the middle of our release and have been trying to learn, adapt and incorporate Scrum methodology for about eight weeks now. I think this would be a right time to jot down few points on how we are progressing as I believe that, the initial euphoria/dejection about incorporating a new process has now died down and people have dirtied their hands sufficiently for about four iterations now (we have each iterations spanning 2 weeks). First the Positive impressions about Scrum: Personally I am impressed by the methodology. Forget everything else, by breaking down the deliverables into atomic units, it helps the managers and engineers to monitor the work at on a regular basis (every two weeks) and make appropriate course corrections whenever mandated. This according to me is the biggest bang for the buck. It builds a healthy working relationships between the different stakeholder

From a collection of writings I wrote in 2007 when I first explored this methodology . We are almost two iterations old with this process now and many issues have started surfacing up. Listed below are some of the very common comments I have been hearing over last few weeks. I am planning to collect all the comments (will keep updating this post as I hear new ones) and finally intend to check whether the comments are resulting out of Scrum or will result irrespective of the process. I am frustrated with Scrum. It is not working for me, I am not able to make any progress I am irritated with the number of meetings I am attending. I dont think the meetings are helping my productivity I am forced to sit at a stretch for 3 -4 hours. The discussions during these meetings are more of a dialog. I think we are all wasting time with these meetings. What scrum, we still have the same problems between the Development and QA. Development is not giving us the feature till the las

From a collection of writings I wrote in 2007 when I first explored this methodology . Yesterday one of our Scrum Masters made a comment "What can I do? I have nothing to say. For all practical purpose I am a dummy and it is the team which is responsible". I thought that that was a very stupid comment to make and at the same time was puzzled at that opinion. The textbook definition of a Scrum master is a " person who ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of rules and sprints of practice. The master protects the scrum team from impediments and distractions ". To me this role is quite powerful albeit that unlike a typical project manager, the scrum master does not enjoy the directive controls over the team. But played well, he has lot of leverage to influence the team, lead the team towards right practices and insulate the teams from external distractions. The closest analogy I can think for this role is that of