Last week Nathan and I went to Yahoo! campus for the monthly Hadoop User Group meeting. Nearly 300 developers packed the room for the talks and socializing that went on well after the last presentation. The two main talks were given by Nathan, who presented and demoed Cascalog (a Clojure based query language for Hadoop), and Dmitriy, an engineer at Twitter, who walked us through their Hadoop ecosystem. I've posted the videos from both these talks — other presentations from Alan Gates of Yahoo and Tom White of Cloudera can be found on the Yahoo Developer Blog.

During his presentation, Nathan demoed the "playground" that ships with Cascalog, which is really just a dataset that is served from memory and can be used from the Clojure REPL to test map reduce queries. Be sure to checkout the slides at the end for more about how we're using Cascalog at BackType that wasn't covered during the presentation.

We're hiring brilliant engineers. If you're excited by working with tools like Cascalog to ask really hard questions of TBs of data, contact us.