We are a group of Big Data engineers who are passionate about Big Data and related Big Data technologies. We have designed, developed, deployed and maintained Big Data applications ranging from batch to real time streaming big data platforms. We have seen a wide range of real world big data problems, implemented some innovative and complex (or simple, depending on how you look at it) solutions. In this page, we will briefly talk about how we got here.
INTRODUCTION WITH THE YELLOW ELEPHANT
Year 2008. An engineering director at a client place asked us to look at this new tool called "Hadoop" and see whether it will solve the performance issues with ETL jobs we had at that time. Only a handful of companies were trying out Hadoop at that time and the Hadoop community was super small compared to its today's size. So we started reading Hadoop documentation on Apache's website and started playing around with it. Immediately we were fascinated by the concept and the technology and we were hooked to it. 4 months and 150 gallons of coffee later we had a 6 node cluster up and running executing our nightly ETL. We were able to solve the performance issues with our ETL jobs with Hadoop. Our Hadoop implementation and the success that came along with it spread through out the engineering department and the product teams. We started receiving lot of "exotic" requests to implement in Hadoop which was previously thought impossible or time consuming to implement. We started seeing our team grow.
OUR SEARCH FOR HADOOP ENGINEERS
With these new ideas/initiatives coming in and the product teams' willingness to pump money in to these initiatives, we looked to hire Hadoop engineers. Few weeks in to our hunt for Hadoop engineers we quickly realized there are not that many Hadoop engineers in the market because Hadoop was very new to the market. So we decided to hire good engineers and programmers and trained them in Hadoop. The training we had for the new engineers was quite powerful and very successful because we exactly know the challenges with Hadoop and our training program was designed to teach exactly those challenges and get them to "production ready" development ASAP.
AND THE HADOOP TRAINING CONTINUED
Year 2011, we started seeing a decent number of Hadoop developers available in the market so we decided there is no need for our training program and we were dead wrong. Most of the candidates we interviewed for Hadoop developer positions were not good enough so we rejected a lot of candidates in the interviews. Even the ones we hired were strong developers but we realized there were not "production ready" for Hadoop. Because they lacked the understanding of the complexities and challenges involve in developing and maintaining production Hadoop environments. So we had no choice to continue our training program.
WE LAUNCHED OUR COURSES ONLINE
Year 2012, we packaged our Hadoop course online internally and made available for the Hadoop engineers that we hired and asked them to go over the course. The online course was just as effective as our class room training and saved us a lot of time and money. Year 2015, we saw a lot of main stream companies adopting Hadoop and also we saw lot of online courses and class room training being offered by other companies and just for the fun of it we looked at those course and they were garbage (to put it lightly). Not only they were totally not worth the money, they did not cover any real world concepts and the most shocking thing was, most of what was being thought was incorrect.
So we decided to make our course online for everyone to consume. Aug 2015, we went live with our free Hadoop Starter Kit course on udemy.com. The response was ecstatic and students were very happy with the content and were asking us for a comprehensive developer course. Student really liked that our teaching incorporated real world practices in Hadoop and the course was completely practical and actionable. Dec 2015, we went live with Hadoop Developer In Real World course.
Our student count continues to grow and the time of of writing, we have over 200,000 students have gone through our courses in udemy.com and on our website. It's been over 7 years since we launched our first free course and our courses till date remain highly rated course in udemy.com. From day 1, our students satisfaction became our top priority so we made customer support top of our list. So it is safe to say we LOVE our students and our students LOVE us back. Check out some of awesome reviews from our awesome students.
HADOOP IN REAL WORLD TO BIG DATA IN REAL WORLD
Following the success of Hadoop Developer In Real World course, we launched our own website, hadoopinrealworld.com. In Sep 2016, we launched Hadoop Administrator In Real World course exclusively on our website. In April 2018, we released Spark Developer In Real World course exclusively on our website.
When we launched hadoopinrealworld.com, we knew the Big Data space would be more than just Hadoop as the space was evolving very fast right before our eyes. We wanted to name our site, bigdatainrealworld.com but that domain wasn't available so we settled with hadoopinrealworld.com. Couple years later, the domain bigdatainrealworld.com became available so we bought it.
We were split between keeping the name hadoopinrealworld.com and changing the name of the website to bigdatainrealworld.com because hadoopinrealworld.com is known well in our community and in our big data space. We believe bigdatainrealworld.com name truly reflect the high quality big data education we offer tailoring to real world big data problems. Finally, in March 2023, we decided to make the switch and rename our website to bigdatainrealworld.com.
Same high quality instructors, same high quality course content, just a new domain name to better represent us in the Big Data space where change is the only constant.
