In sum, this is a great addition to the Spark Summit. Thanks to IBM for organizing this pre-conference event and for contributing so much to the Apache Spark open source project.

Next day, the day before the Spark Summit East, the actual Spark Technology Meeting took place. Below, you see a view from my hotel room towards Downtown Boston, MA. It was clear that the weather would be an issue during the coming days...

I made it to the actual event even though the city was getting loads of snow. The different IBM employees discussed the different areas to which they contributed in the Spark code.