Dan Keeley is one of the first members of the Pentaho user community. Based in London, Dan has been working with Pentaho for many years and attended almost every community meeting. I have talked to Dan about his presentation at PCM17 on serverless Pentaho Data Integration and what he remembers from the first Pentaho Community Meeting back in 2008.
Who are you?
I’m a computer science graduate who’s been working in IT for nearly 20 years now. Initially a software performance tester, i soon moved into the BI and analytics arena. I’m the co-founder of the Pentaho London usergroup, co-organiser of the Pentaho Community Meeting in 2015 and a reviewer of several Pentaho-related books, and all of that adds up to being an active community member.
What is your connection to Pentaho?
I’ve been developing applications with Pentaho for over 10 years now. Initially as a customer (first EE customer in the UK), then as the owner of my own consultancy company.
What will your talk be about and why should people attend it?
My talk is based upon a short blog series I did about serverless PDI. (Public) cloud computing has progressed so far now that you can get massive amounts of power for very little cost and I wanted to tap into that for a POC i was building.
Pentaho has always been most valuable in the SME market – they can get huge value from the tool, and if they can now run it on free infrastructure then so much the better. This solution also ties into IoT, so is ticking a lot of current on-trend boxes.
So attend if you have an interest in service integration, efficiently running Pentaho Data Integration in the cloud, or just curious about the guts of building and embedding PDI in general.
If you look back at Pentaho back in 2008, what comes to your mind?
I remember Tom Barber (Magicaltrout) battling against the horrendously complicated installation processes of the time, and coming up with the idea of a „Pentaho Live CD“ or VM to make things easier. A great idea.
I also remember the great community vibe – it was the first tech meetup/conference I’d ever attended, and I think Pentaho was ahead of the game here. Now, in London there are data-related meetups every single weeknight!
Last but not least: What do you expect from the event?
I expect an evolution of the well-known format, I’m looking forward to catching up with colleagues as well as meeting new. For me the networking is easily as important at the talks themselves. And hopefully I won’t be late for the hackathon this year!
