Rich Morrow

Become a Rock Star Hadoop Developer

April 24, 2013 Rich Morrow Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

So you want to learn how to become a Hadoop Developer? A little bit of Java, a little bit of Linux, you definitely need skills that span multiple disciplines. It’s certainly not an easy task but here are some tips and tricks that I’ve learned as a Cloudera instructor to help you on your way to becoming a Hadoop rock star!

Hadoop is written in Java, and if you’re a Java Developer already, you’ll be very comfortable getting around in the codebase. If you’re like me, however, and Java is not the primary language you write code in, you may find the following quick refresher valuable.

Apache Hadoop: The Swiss Army Knife of IT

April 4, 2013 Rich Morrow Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

In the world of big data, most industry experts agree that Hadoop is the tool of choice for ingestion, analysis, and interpretation of the massive amounts of data that nearly every business finds itself swimming in. Business leaders have discovered that this data has real and profound impacts on the bottom line, and as a result, more and more IT departments are tasked with creating and maintaining software to pull value out of that data.

Using Hadoop Like a Boss

January 23, 2013 Rich Morrow Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Once you’re doing real development, you’ll want to get into the habit of using smaller, test datasets on your local machine and running your code iteratively in Local Jobrunner Mode (which lets you locally test and debug your Map and Reduce code), then Pseudo-Distributed Mode (which more closely mimics the production environment), then finally Fully-Distributed Mode (your real production cluster). By doing this iterative development, you’ll be able to get bugs worked out on smaller subsets of the data so that when you run on your full dataset with real production resources, you’ll have all the kinks worked out, and your job won’t crash three-quarters of the way in.

Hadoop’s Value Proposition

January 16, 2013 Rich Morrow Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Learning how to program and develop for the Hadoop platform can lead to lucrative new career opportunities in Big Data. But like the problems it solves, the Hadoop framework can be quite complex and challenging. Building a strong foundation, leveraging online resources, and focusing on the basics with professional training can help neophytes across the Hadoop finish line. If I’ve learned one thing in two decades of IT, it’s that the learning never ends. In the following posts, I’d like to walk you through the path that I took in identifying Hadoop as a “must have” skill and how I quickly got ramped up on the technology.