Wow, so this week has been an intense return to Portland for me. I got back earlier in the week and hit the ground doing a bit of catch up after being on the rails for two weeks to Denver, over to San Francisco and then back up here to Portland. The whole time cramming my brain full of Erlang, getting ramped up on efforts to help bring Riak to everybody that it can help, expand the open source community and do what I do. Expand the community and the risk taking, code inventing, hacker of hardware, and curious ideas that we all have as best I can.
Turning from looking back and looking forward, getting into a proactive view of events coming up there are a couple things I want to let everybody know about. They’re all intertwined here in the Portland Tech Community and well beyond, with events in Seattle and Vancouver BC coming up sooner than later!
Basho Coworking Office Hours
These events are every two weeks, starting this Monday. The meet is at NedSpace, we’ll grab the excellent Butcher’s Block Table and converse, code together, implement or deploy Riak and generally answer, present or find the information you need. Feel free to come in and join at anytime during 9am-11am on Monday the 4th, and every two weeks hereafter. You can RSVP here (meetup.com) or here *(eventbrite). For those that are RSVPed and show we’ll have various swag. Prospectively after building some momentum we’ll start bringing in some premium coffee or other beverages to help kick off your day.
Write The Docs
This is a new conference here in Portland that is being put together around documentation, document driven development and topics surrounding this oft overlooked and extremely important aspect of software development. As one would expect, it has a github repo.
Currently there are some speakers, but the call for proposals is still open, so check it out and if you’re interested in speaking jump in there and add to the conference and growing conversation! Here’s a short description from the conference site about what Write The Docs is about,
“Write the Docs is a two-day conference focused on documentation systems, tech writing theory, and information delivery. It will be held on April 8-9 in Portland, Oregon.
Writing and maintaining documentation involves the talents of a multidisciplinary community of technical writers, designers, typesetters, developers, support teams, marketers, and many others.
This conference creates a time and a place for this community of documentarians to share information, discuss ideas, and work together to improve the art and science of documentation.
We invite all those who write the docs to spread the word:
Docs or it didn’t happen!”
Speakers so far… there are more coming!
Nóirín Plunkett Plunkett AKA @noirinp the Curator of People
From the recent speaker announcement, “Nóirín Plunkett is a jack of all trades, and a master of several. By day, she works for Eucalyptus Systems, as a geek<->English translator, and general force multiplier. She’s passionate about community, communication, and collaboration. Nóirín got her open source start at Apache, helping out with the httpd documentation project.”
Kenneth Reitz AKA @kennethreitz the Wandering street photographer and moral fallibilist & Pythoner
From the recent speaker announcement, “Kenneth Reitz is the product owner of Python at Heroku and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He embraces minimalism, elegant architecture, and simple interfaces. Kenneth is well known for his many open source projects, specifically Requests. His projects are always well documented, and he is the curator of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, which documents best practices for Python developers.”
Jim R. Wilson AKA @helixb the jimbojw and helixb and…
From the recent speaker announcement, “Jim R. Wilson started hacking at the age of 13 and never looked back. He has contributed to open source projects such as MediaWiki and HBase, and managed the large-scale documentation system at Vistaprint. He’s co-author of one NoSQL book, and currently writing a node.js book.”
The perpetrators of this conference are the reknown Troy Howard @thoward37, Eric Redmond @coderoshi and a fellow tech cohort I’ve recently met at The Side Door Eric Holscher @ericholscher.
Node PDX
There’s an announcement coming real soon about this!
