Last Tuesday I gave a short presentation at the new Boulder Hadoopers Group about testing Hadoop jobs with MRUnit. You will have to know what Hadoop is and how to read Groovy code to fully understand it. I am including the important notes on the slides as well.

Why use MRUnit?

Testing a Hadoop job requires a lot of effort not related to the job. You must configure it to run locally, create a sample input file, run the job on your sample input, and then compare to an expected output file. This not only takes time, but makes your tests run very slow due to all the file I/O.

I have liked the works of Jacob Gube of Six Revisions and Garrick Cheung of the MooTools Community Team, so when Packt Publishing wanted me to review their book, I accepted.

I hope authors, as well as readers, will gain some insights. Here is my review of MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide.

Book Structure

The book basically takes you, step-by-step, through downloading the MooTools library parts and building simple examples with HTML, CSS, and, of course, MooTools. It seems to touch on many of major parts of MooTools: Core, DOM selection, Events, Ajax, and Fx. Finally, it introduces you to MooTools More and how to write your own MooTools plugins. it approaches everything with very simple, very “hands-on” examples. There are some deviations (like pop quizzes), but they are few.

I had a great 2-and-a-half year journey with Sun, but my time there is sadly at an end. I was very fortunate to have worked with some very, very smart people. We’ll certainly keep in touch.

I worked on some really cool internal (and therefore not shareable) projects in Java, Jython, and Web languages and platforms. They were generally fun, diverse and challenging.

On to Return Path!

I’ll now be joining a small, agile team at Return Path. We will make email safer, and (I hope) win the war over spam. Audacious yes. Impossible… I think not.