OS Bridge Day 1 kicked off. I had more than a few goals to achieve for the day.
- Give my presentation “Data and Applications Across the Void :: Distributing Systems“, the first with this layout, of key topics and concepts around distributed systems.
- Meet Jason Denizac @_jden for coffee at Public Domain and catch up.
- Attend Beer Um’ Tuesday Too (i.e. B.U.T.T.) the almost unknown yet known beer meetup from the mind of genius Jerry Sievert @jerrysievert and march over with a contingent from OS Bridge.
- Attend the following: Kicking Impostor Syndrome in the Head, Test Driven Development with Angular JS and Terraformer.
- Plot next steps involving Bosh, Cloud Foundry, Riak and OpenShift.
Upon arriving I checked in and got the super sweet water bottle that the OS Bridge team got for speaker gifts. Gotta say good job, something a bit different, something that’s quality and something worth keeping! I dig it. I immediately washed it out and carried it around for thirst quenching the rest of the day.
Kicking Impostor Syndrome in the Head
This talk tackled the ideas of how to be more inclusive, allow people to actually gain buy in and confidence in the work they’re doing. This is a hugely important set of ideas that most of the large corporate world has no clue about. Thus the dramatically lower productivity, individual leadership, pride and happiness that people have working in large corporate enterprises & especially Government. This is a space that should be an extremely high priority for those businesses to study.
Denise Paolucci did a great job engaging the crowd and relaying the ideas of how to improve work environments to really bring out the best in people. Simply, it occurred to me this could be summarized as, “Don’t be a dick, how to kick ass, and build the whole team to do just that!”
The talk included ideas such as making it safe to fail, don’t scapegoat someone around an idea that doesn’t work, but try a new path and move toward succeeding. Don’t setup people to fail, because that drags everybody down. Document things even when everybody supposedly knows those things. The list goes on, but that’s a good base for the ideas.
Check out Dreamwith Studios for more of Denise’s work.
Test Driven Development with Angular JS
This session was presented by Joe Eames @josepheames. I really wanted to go check this out, as I’ve been keen on AngularJS the last couple months but have not been able to work with it as much as I’d like to. So any exposure is good exposure in my book. This is when the bad news kicked in, I had to run off and take care of some minor priorities. Errands, ugh.
For those like me, that either weren’t at OS Bridge or missed this session, this one will be put up live at some point so keep an eye out for the videos being posted. For an immediate fix, Joe has a podcast at JavaScript Jabber. He’s also got a site related to doing TDD & JavaScript at Test Driven JS.
DIY Electric Vehicles
My friend, beverage connoisseur and JavaScripting genius Jerry Sievert @jerrysievert strolled by and mentioned DIY Electric Vehicles, DIY Electric Cars, DIY Electric Bikes and DIY DIY DIY DIY Stuffs. So I packed and headed to this workshop without any original plan to attend anything at this time.
This was a solid session with an introduction to electric vehicles, what they look like, how they work, what types of batteries are good for this use and coverage of Benjamin Kero’s @bkero DIY Electric Bike. Really cool stuff, and something that I really want to expand on and connect even more tech, similar to this plus something like Helios Bars.
Next up…
Terraformer
Terraformer is a project kicked off by Jerry Sievert @jerrysievert that provides some pretty solid mapping toolkit. For more information on this project, check out these links:
- Terreformer on Github
- Patrick Arlt’s Github & Jerry Sievert’s Github
- Also check out Jerry’s Blog, just cuz’ it’s good reading and thinking.
Hacker Lounge
During and after all the sessions OS Bridge is fairly well known for its awesome Hacker Lounge. Before many arrived, early in the morning just before the first keynote I snapped a wide angle of the Hacker Lounge…
…and here’s a few shots of the Hacker Lounge in full effect.
…the Lego table for solutions…
…and hardware hacking.
That’s it for day one. Happy hacking.
