At Apple, the engineers regularly organized 'brown bag lunches'. These were informal midday presentations where one of the team stood up and taught everyone a subject or tool they're passionate about. I've been missing that, so as an experiment I spent an hour at Get Satisfaction's offices today, giving their folks an introduction to MapReduce and Hadoop. I talked through when it's useful, and then we all got out our laptops and coded up a simple MapReduce job flow in Python, runnable from the command line and ready to be dropped into Hadoop.
I enjoyed it, and the team seemed to get a lot out of it too, so I've decided to do a few more. It's aimed at any company with Big Data problems and traditonal database expertise, and will leave your team with the ability to run simple Hadoop jobs on Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service, or just from the command-line, all using Python.
If this sounds like something you need, and you're in the Bay Area, drop me an email. The deal is that you feed me, give me schwag, and invite me to vacation on your yacht once you're rich and famous. I only have a couple of slots open before I fly off to Europe in the new year though, so do jump in quick.
Pete Warden's blog 