So I sat down and hacked up a new version of Adron.me. I snagged a site theme and skin from Theme Forest and ran with it. Broke apart each of a few sections to get a minimally viable site up within 24 hours. I got interrupted a few times with a few other things I needed to wrap up, more about those things later. For now I put together the site, check it out @ http://adron.me. I also put together a video of the hack session during various stages of getting the site live.
During the video I also have a few excursions away form the code to help stay focused on the code. At one point I’m actually working on the Junction App too. Also, keep an eye on it and you can see my Sublime 2 usage, iMac, Lenovo Carbon X1, Ubuntu and a whole slew of other tech. More on all those things too, for now… here’s the video.
…and yeah, no real code complexities or such, mostly an excuse to make a video to some oddball dubstep from the scraps of video I put together during building http://adron.me. Hope it was entertaining, cheers – Adron.
The Rails 2013 Conference kicked off for me, with a short bike ride through town to the conference center. The Portland conference center is one of the most connected conference centers I’ve seen; light rail, streetcar, bus, bicycle boulevards, trails & of course pedestrian access is all available. I personally have no idea if you can drive to it, but I hear there is parking & such for drivers.
Streetcars
Rails Conf however clearly places itself in the category of a conference of people that give a shit! This is evident in so many things among the community, from the inclusive nature creating one of the most diverse groups of developers to the fact they handed out 7 day transit passes upon picking up your Rails Conf Pass!
Bikes!
The keynote was by DHH (obviously right?). He laid out where the Rails stack is, some roadmap topics & drew out how much the community had grown. Overall, Rails is now in the state of maintain and grow the ideal. Considering its inclusive nature I hope to see it continue to grow and to increase options out there for people getting into software development.
Railsconf 2013
I also met a number of people while at the conference. One person I ran into again was Travis, who lives out yonder in Jacksonville, Florida and works with Hashrocket. Travis & I, besides the pure metal, have Jacksonville as common stomping ground. Last year I’d met him while the Hash Rocket Crew were in town. We discussed Portland, where to go and how to get there, plus what Hashrocket has been up to in regards to use around Mongo, other databases and how Ruby on Rails was treating them. The conclusion, all good on the dev front!
One of these days though, the Hashrocket crew is just gonna have to move to Portland. Sorry Jacksonville, we’ll visit one day. 😉
For the later half of the conferene I actually dove out and headed down for some client discussions in the country of Southern California. Nathan Aschbacher headed up Basho attendance at the conference from this point on. Which reminds me, I’ve gotta get a sitrep with Nathan…
RICON East (May 13th & 14th)
RICON East
Ok, so I didn’t actually attend RICON East (sad face), I had far too many things to handle over here in Portlandia – but I watched over 1/3rd of the talks via the 1080p live stream. The basic idea of the RICON Conferences, is a conference series focused on distributed systems. Riak is of course a distributed database, falling into that category, but RICON is by no means merely about Riak at all. At RICON the talks range from competing products to acedemic heavy hitting talks about how, where and why distributed systems are the future of computing. They may touch on things you may be familiar with such as;
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
Existing databases and how they may fit into the fabric of distributed systems (such as Postgresql)
How to scale distributed across AWS Cloud Services, Azure or other cloud providers
RICON East
As the videos are posted online I’ll be providing some blog entries around the talks. It will however be extremely difficult to choose the first to review, just as RICON back in October of 2012, every single talk was far above the modicum of the median!
Two immediate two talks that stand out was Christopher Meiklejohn’s @cmeik talk, doing a bit o’ proofs and all, in realtime off the cuff and all. It was merely a 5 minute lightnight talk, but holy shit this guy can roll through and hand off intelligence via a talk so fast in blew my mind!
The other talk was Kyle’s, AKA @aphry, who went through network partitions with databases. Basically destroying any comfort you might have with your database being effective at getting reads in a partition event. Kyle knows his stuff, that is without doubt.
There are many others, so subscribe keep reading and I’ll be posting them in the coming weeks.
Node PDX 2013 (May 16th & 17th)
Horse_js and other characters, planning some JavaScript hacking!
Holy moley we did it, again! Thanks to EVERYBODY out there in the community for helping us pull together another kick ass Node PDX event! That’s two years in a row now! My fellow cohort of Troy Howard @thoward37 and Luc Perkins @lucperkins had hustled like some crazed worker bees to get everything together and ready – as always a lot always comes together the last minute and we don’t get a wink of sleep until its all done and everybody has had a good time!
Node PDX Sticker Selection was WICKED COOL!
Node PDX, it’s pretty self descriptive. It’s a one Node.js conference that also includes topics on hardware, javascript on the client side and a host of other topics. It’s also Portland specific. We have Portland Local Roasted Coffee (thanks Ristretto for the pour over & Coava for the custom roast!), Portland Beer (thanks brew capital of the world!), Portland Food (thanks Nicolas’!), Portland DJs (thanks Monika Mhz!), Portland Bands and tons of Portland wierdness all over the place. It’s always a good time! We get the notion at Node PDX, with all the Portlandia spread all over it’s one of the reasons that 8-12 people move to and get hired in Portland after this conference every year (it might become a larger range, as there are a few people planning to make the move in the coming months!).
A wide angle view of Holocene where Node PDX magic happened!
The talks this year increased in number, but maintained a solid range of topics. We had a node.js disco talk, client side JavaScript, sensors and node.js, and even heard about people’s personal stories of how they got into programming JavaScript. Excellent talks, and as with RICON, I’ll be posting a blog entry and adding a few penny thoughts of my own to each talk.
Tea & Chris kick off Polyglot Conference 2013!A smiling crowd!
Polyglot Conference was held in Vancouver again this year, with clear intent to expand to Portland and Seattle in the coming year or two. I’m super stoked about this and will definitely be looking to help out – if you’re interested in helping let me know and I’ll get you in contact with the entire crew that’s been handling things so far!
Polyglot Conference itself is a yearly conference held as an open spaces event. The way open space conferences work is described well on Wikipedia were it is referred to as Open Spaces Technology.
The crowds amass to order the chaos of tracks.
The biggest problem with this conference, is that it’s technically only one day. I hope that we can extend it to two days for next year – and hopefully even have the Seattle and Portland branches go with an extended two day itenerary.
A counting system…
This year the break out sessions that that I attended included “Dev Tools”, “How to Be a Better Programmer”, “Go (Language) Noises”, other great sessions and I threw down a session of my own on “Distributed Systems”. Overall, great time and great sessions! I had a blast and am looking forward to next year.
By the way, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this at the beginning of this blog entry, but this is only THE BEGINNING OF SUMMER IN CASCADIA! I’ll have more coverage of these events and others coming up, the roadmap includes OS Bridge (where I’m also speaking) and Portland’s notorious OSCON.
Until the next conference, keep hacking on that next bad ass piece of software, cheers!
I just wrapped up a long weekend of staycation. Monday kicked off Write the Docs this week and today, Tuesday, I’m getting back into the saddle.
Write the Docs
The Write the Docs Conference this week, a two day affair, has kicked off an expanding community around document creation. This conference is about what documentation is, how we create documentation as technical writers, writers, coders and others in the field.
Not only is it about those things it is about how people interact and why documentation is needed in projects. This is one of the things I find interesting, as it seems obvious, but is entirely not obvious because of the battle between good documentation, bad documentation or a complete lack of documentation. The later being the worse situation.
The Bloody War of Documentation!
At this conference it has been identified that the ideal documentation scenario is that building it starts before any software is even built. I do and don’t agree with this, because I know we must avoid BDUF (Big Design Up Front). But we must take this idea, of documentation first, in the appropriate context of how we’re speaking about documentation at the conference. Just as tests & behaviors identified up front, before the creation of the actual implementation is vital to solid, reliable, consistent, testable & high quality production software, good documentation is absolutely necessary.
There are some situations, the exceptions, such as with agencies that create software, in which the software is throwaway. I’m not and don’t think much of the conference is about those types of systems. What we’ve been speaking about at the conference is the systems, or ecosystems, in which software is built, maintained and used for many years. We’re talking about the APIs that are built and then used by dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. Think of Facebook, Github and Twitter. All of these have APIs that thousands upon thousands use everyday. They’re successful in large part, extremely so, because of stellar documentation. In the case of Facebook, there’s some love and hate to go around because they’ve gone between good documentation and bad documentation. However whenever it has been reliable, developers move forward with these APIs and have built billion dollar empires that employ hundreds of people and benefit thousands of people beyond that.
As developers that have been speaking at the conference, and developers in the audience, and this developer too all tend to agree, build that README file before you build a single other thing within the project. Keep that README updated, keep it marked up and easy to read, and make sure people know what your intent is as best you can. Simply put, document!
You might also have snarkily asked, does Write the Docs have docs,why yes, it does:
Today while using my iPhone, catching up on news & events over the time I had my staycation I took a photo. On that photo I used Stitch to put together some arrows. Kind of a Portland Proper Brew (PPB) with documentation. (see what I did there!) It exemplifies a great way to start the day.
Everyday I bike (or ride the train or bus) in to downtown Porltand anywhere from 5-9 kilometers and swing into Barista on 3rd. Barista is one of the finest coffee shops, in Portland & the world. If you don’t believe me, drag your butt up here and check it out. Absolutely stellar baristas, the best coffee (Coava, Ritual, Sightglass, Stumptown & others), and pretty sweet digs to get going in the morning.
I’ll have more information on a new project I’ve kicked off. Right now it’s called Bike n’ Hack, which will be a scavenger style code hacking & bicycle riding urban awesome game. If you’re interested in hearing more about this, the project, the game & how everything will work be sure to contact me via twitter @adron or jump into the bike n’ hack github organization and the team will be adding more information about who, what, where, when and why this project is going to be a blast!
Hope you have a little patience, this blog entry is going to be pretty long. There was a multitude of conferences, more than a hundred pair coding sessions, more cities, hotels and other things as I criss crossed the country helping to knock out projects, code, fire off some open source projects and generally get some technology implemented. It has been a spectacular year. I also could add, it has thoroughly kicked my ass and I’ve loved it.
2012 Coding Projects
In 2012 I’ve taken the healm of the Iron Foundry Project which led to the creation of Tier 3 Web Fabric PaaS. A Cloud Foundry & Iron Foundry .NET based PaaS. From there the project led to an expansion of leading the efforts on the Thor Project, which is a Cloud Foundry User Interface for OS-X and Windows 7. Beyond that I’ve contributed to and participated in dozens of different projects in various ways over the year. I finished up this year by joining Basho in December and thus, joined the Riak & related Basho Projects.
Some of the projects I’ve started, will join or hope to otherwise continue participation in include the following. Here’s to hoping 2013 is a hard core coding and contributing year of excellence!
Many of the Basho Organization’s Projects I’ll be diving into, including work around Rebar, Riak, Docs & a number of others.
Name Factory – a project I’ve started a while back of Riak + JavaScript around creating massive test data with JavaScript and also using Riak for the storage & searching on that data created.
Criollo – Criollo is one of the most common forms of cocoa, is a native OS-X Cocoa User Interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
SpikeOp – This I’ve dubbed the name of the iOS interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
I want to use and possibly contribute to Corrugated Iron, the .NET Client for Riak. Prospectively to use for a Windows 8 User Interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
Expand on prospective services for Cloud Foundry, either I or efforts I may lead to do this.
…there are others, but they’ll have to be figured out during the course of events. Also, there are an easy dozen other projects I’ll be working that don’t particularly have to do with coding, two are listed below. For an easy way to keep up with the projects I’m coding on, leading, participating in or otherwise hit me up on Twitter @adron or ADN @adron.
Big Project Aims for 2013
Thrashing Code Project – This is sort of, kind of secret. It’s going to happen soon, I have a personal schedule for it and I’ll be releasing information accordingly when the site and twitter account goes live.
Tour Triumvirate – I intend to plan, and hopefully will take at least 2 of the three tech tours I setup. More information will be forthcoming, but the original notion is outlined in the blog entry I wrote titled “The Adron Code Tour, Let’s Hack, Bike and Talk Hard Core Technology“.
Books I’ve Read in 2012
All of these I’ve either read or re-read in 2012. I set a goal at the beginning of last year to get my ass in gear when it comes to reading. A focused, get it read, understood and learn approach. I think I did pretty good overall. Not a book a week, but I’m getting back in gear. Considering my best year of reading was 100+ books, it might be a difficult to reach that again since I’m a working citizen, versus a child with plenty of time on their hands. But, it’s good to have goals. 😉
The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
The Rails 3 Way
Eloquent Ruby
The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You, Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat
The Myth of the Robber Barons
Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT
Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
Rework
Steve Jobs
Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Node for Front-End Developers
First Contact (In Her Name: The Last War, #1)
Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing
The REST API Design Handbook
HTML5 Canvas
HTML5: Up and Running
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Traffic
Book Reading Aims for 2013
Natural Capitalism
How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
Political Ideals
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
Bikenomics: An Introduction to the Bicycle Economy
Everyday Bicycling: How to Ride a Bike for Transportation (Whatever Your Lifestyle)
Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
Erlang Programming
Building Web Applications with Erlang: Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws
Think Complexity: Complexity Science and Computational Modeling
Async JavaScript
Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere (Smashing Magazine Book Series)
Windows PowerShell for Developers
How to Use the Unix-Linux vi Text Editor
Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook
Designing Interfaces
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
Consider Phlebas
Snow Crash
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise
Simply Complexity
Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
Thinking In Systems: A Primer
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Programming in Objective-C
Learning iPad Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building iPad Apps with iOS 5
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
Getting Started with GEO, CouchDB, and Node.js
JavaScript Web Applications
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
Design Patterns in Ruby
…and the two books I’d like to re-read this year because they’re just absurdly entertaining and I’d like a refresher of the stories.
A Confederacy of Dunces (I’ll be reading this for the 2nd time)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Yup, just want to read it again)
My 2012 Coder’s Year in Photos
What I’ve put together here is a photo story of the year, hopefully it’s entertaining in some way. With that, here’s a review of the year, cheers and happy new year! 2012 started with one of my last hack sessions as a Seattle Resident at Ruby at Racer weekly meetup.
Ruby at Racer Meetup
Meanwhile some of my last views from Russell Investments. Absolutely beautiful, epic and awe inspiring views of the Puget Sound from the Emerald City of Seattle.
View from Russell Investments Seattle Headquarters, stunning!
Then a fitting image, from the business meeting floor of the same building, the settings sun for my departure.
Overlooking the Puget Sound, Japanese Garden in the forefront from the Russell Investments Building in Seattle.
February of 2012 kicked of with my return to Portland, Oregon. Stumptown regularly welcomed me back more than a few moments.
Stumptown Morning Brew
One of the first meetups I attended back in Portland was the DevOps Meetup.
DevOps DevOpers Hanging around pre-meeting at PuppetLabs in Portland.
That DevOps meetup just happened to have a session on one of the code bases I was working with, Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Foundry preso on how the pull requests and such where going to be built into a process, which still today is rather cumbersome for community involvement. However, it’s still moving forward, albeit at a slower pace than it could if it was streamlined around github instead of github being an “end point” read only repository…
While my move consisted of many a couch, as I just couch surfed for the first 45 or so days I was back in Portland, I finally moved into a place at the Indigo in downtown.
My New Place, priorities as they are my system sits in the corner ready for use.
The new system, albeit a great Christmas present from 2011, became the defacto work system of 2012 and remains one of my top machines. Mac Book Air w/ 4GB RAM, i5 Proc, 256 GB SSD. Not a bad machine.
2011 Mac Book Air, settled into it’s workspace cradle.
A view from on high, looking down upon the streets of San Francisco from the New Relic Offices. Thanks for the invite and the visit, it was great meeting the great team at New Relic San Francisco!
New Relic San Francisco View
Getting around on my first trip to San Francisco of 2012. Thanks to John, Bjorn, Bill, John and the whole team in Portland and San Francisco for the invite. Great talking to you guys.
MUNI Streetcar FTW!
On the same trip it began pouring rain as I’d never seen before in San Francisco. I sat by Duboche Park, staying warm and away from drowning! Arriving outside was one of the MUNIs that eventually I was rescued by from the torrential floods and returned to downtown, dry and intact!
MUNI to the rescue on the torrential downpour of the year in San Francisco.
…and Julia thanks for the tour around San Francisco and the extra tasty lunch at EAT!! Good times!
Eating at the EAT sign!
Amidst all these images, I threw together some into a collage. There are a number of awesome coders & hackers of all sorts in these images. Shout out to Jerry Sievert, Eric Sterling,
Snikies, a collage I made!!!! (This one you can click on for a full size image)
…and alas I’ll have another zillion images and such as we all roll into 2013 and onward. Cheers! For some more new years posts I’ve found useful check out this list, which I’ll be adding to over the next few days.
This next week I’m off to San Francisco for a coder’s vacation. I don’t exactly know what a coder’s vacation is but that’s what I’m aiming to define! I’ll put together a description of my idea of a coder’s vacation below. There are going to be several components about this vacation that really make it a coder’s vacation, such as:
My trip is to San Francisco – This makes it an ideal place to be, as a coder, to hone one’s skills and meet the top people in startups, software and other areas. There is literally coding happening all over the city. Plus it is a fairly nice city to frequent to begin with.
I’m Traveling via the Coast Starlight – This will give me significant time to study up on some of the things I’m learning right now. A little node.js, javascript, go and maybe even some other things while I relax in luxury and enjoy first class accommodations in the sleeper. I’ll also be blogging a bit about this and what it is like to disconnect for a while when you’re in transit between two points. There is some serious time to get out of the rat race and figure out we’re your headed personally, with technology, coding and more (and yes, that is one of my pictures of the Coast Starlight from a few years ago, it is a beast of a train at 15 cars!).
I’ll be attending RICON 2012 – If you’re going to be there, let me know. We should meetup during the conference. Maybe pair up on some code, discuss data architectures, dilemmas and related things or just grab a drink. Since the trip is coinciding with the conference, there was no way I wasn’t going to go hang out with the Basho Crew and their inaugeral conference on #phatdata (see twitter for more context).
I’ll be speaking at HTML 5 Developer’s Conference – This isn’t during the “vacation” part of the trip, but it is in San Francisco.
Pairing up, conversations & coding with others – Because San Francisco is one of the best places in the world for this. I’ll be meeting up with some other coders and working on some ideas around #phatdata, architecture with various frameworks and solutions like Node.js, JavaScript and prospectively some others.
I’ll be tweeting, documenting, blogging, video recording and photographing – Nuff’ said. 🙂
Definition:
Coder’s Vacation – [kohd]-er’s [vey-key–shuhn, vuh-] – A form of vacation, except that the individual taking the vacation is a coder and participates in coder activities. Such as hackathons, pair coding, maker development, physical computing, learning or reading about new software development technologies or otherwise spends their time on the vacation.
Phat Data (see also #phatdata) – [fat] [dey-tuh, dat-uh, dah-tuh] – I’ve replaced the use of the big data term with that of phat data. It just seems more fun, just as poor a characterization of the topic, so why not. If you can define big datathen you can define phat data! So basically, help me define this, I’ll be tweeting about it a lot at RICON 2012.
For more definitions of things I often use in phrases on the blog, check out my dictionary. With this laid out, let the coder vacation begin.
Today while using my iPhone, catching up on news & events over the time I had my staycation I took a photo. On that photo I used Stitch to put together some arrows. Kind of a Portland Proper Brew (PPB) with documentation. (see what I did there!) It exemplifies a great way to start the day.
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