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Arjuna Chala
Senior Director, HPCC Systems Solutions Lab
LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group

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Flavio interviews Sr Software Engineer and ECL instructor, Bob Foreman, along with Sr Consulting Software Engineer and Chief Trainer, Richard Taylor, both with LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group to chat about their experiences in the training world of teaching ECL and HPCC Systems over the past ten years

. First up, Richard tells the story of how the HPCC Systems platform was born in the late 1990s when there was a critical need for massively parallel processing of massive data sets – our first supercomputer. At that time Richard was the only trainer around to teach the platform and ECL language to our users, which then were our own employees and customers. Fast forward to 2011 when Bob Foreman joined the team as a second trainer which was perfect timing as that was when HPCC Systems became open source. Bob shares his passion and love for teaching and knew this was a huge step, and challenge, to introduce the platform and language to a new community. Training plays a vital role when wanting to build a strong community of users to learn, adopt and ultimately contribute back to the platform. This was no small task. Richard goes on to explain all the courses which were taught for a proprietary system had to be rewritten to fit the open source paradigm. Bob discusses how internal lingo and phrases had to change in order to make sense to a new set of users. They both were ready and eager to shift to a new way of teaching to accommodate an open source model. The benefits of open source brings in a wider community base across the globe, but with just two trainers, something innovative had to happen in order to support the reach of our growing community. This push gave birth to our first set of online self-paced classes, or “MOOCs” as Flavio likes to call them, and remote training. This became a game changer. Classes were filling up and hitting record breaking attendance with students from various locations around the world.

Over the years, the training materials and lessons evolved to meet the needs of the open source community and helping businesses solve real world data problems. Bob, the voice of the online lessons, shares the best satisfaction he receives from teaching is seeing one of his students excel from what they learned in his class and go on to build impressive solutions, not only for their business, but for ours too. The open source world introduced unique case studies we have never seen before and it is a true win to see how HPCC Systems is being leveraged across a variety of industries from our external community. Richard also touches on his new 3-book series, with the first one, Definitive HPCC Systems, available now on Amazon, which covers an overview of the platform, with the following books focusing more on ECL.

A big announcement is also unveiled! To commemorate the 10th anniversary with our HPCC Systems community, we are giving away the entire suite of online courses for FREE all year long in 2021! And there is more! Bob talks about the new set of Applied ECL courses covering Machine Learning, and coming soon, Embedded Languages. They are excited to expand the course material to support the evolution of the platform with the move to the cloud and all the 8.0 functionality ahead. 10 courses and counting – all free! The discussion closes with a recap of the excitement of all the success from the last 10 years and looking forward to what the next 10 years will bring. And don’t forget – FREE training in 2021!

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In this interview, Flavio speaks with Dan Camper, one of our founding HPCC Systems Community members, who now is an employee of LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, who shares his story on learning and working with the HPCC Systems platform. 

Full interview recap and recording coming soon.

Flavio welcomes David Dasher as the guest for this episode. His company was one of the first adopters of HPCC Systems for his business in the hospitality industry. David explains the challenges he faced at the time and how the HPCC Systems platform has helped the growth of his company. 

Full interview recap and recording coming soon.

In this episode, Flavio has a chat with Bahar Fardanian, Technology Evangelist, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, whose role was specifically created to support our growing open source HPCC Systems community.

Full interview recap and recording coming soon.