hadoop

In the case of Hadoop's S3 connector, this could eliminate this entire directory, plus its tests, plus a bunch of hooks in the main code: https://github.com/apache/hadoop/tree/trunk/hadoop-tools/had.... There's an argument in favor of keeping it in case other S3-compatible stores need it (though you'd still need DynamoDB or some equivalent) and because it makes metadata lookups so much faster than S3 scans, which helps with query planning performance. But I imagine even fewer people will take the trade-off now that Amazon S3 itself is consistent.

I would recommend contributing code to a well known FOSS project, or at least an existing project that you use or respect. I think hacking on meaningful projects will be clear milestones for yourself, which seems to be what you’re looking for. To encourage you, here are a couple of contributions I have to Linux and Hadoop: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/0bef71093d446165964... https://github.com/apache/hadoop/pull/114 If you read through the commit messages and look at the patches, I think you’ll find that reaching these clear milestones doesn’t take an unattainable amount of skill; just a bit of patience and curiosity.

> If it were written in Go instead of Java, I could have done `go get apache.org/hadoop` This complaint is just about packaging, and not the language itself. Any project can have good or back packing scripts, and for Java there are plenty of ways to make it "good". Not to mention, the BUILDING.txt document clearly states they use maven[1] and to build you just do: mvn compile > Go's win is that it makes the actual running of real software in production better This might just be a familiarity issue, because once you launch the program, all things are equal. And yes, you can bundle a JVM with your java app, which makes it exactly like GO's statically linked runtime and just as portable without any fuss. [1] https://github.com/apache/hadoop/blob/trunk/BUILDING.txt