Category: Community

Node PDX – Introducing Ward Cunningham, Nexxy, Jerry Seivert and Hannah Fousanon!

Here’s the first of a series of introductions for the upcoming Node PDX Conference here in bright and sunny Portland, Oregon!

…and no, that isn’t sarcasm, it’s the summer time now so we’re allowed to have sun and warm weather! With that, the speakers for Node PDX!

Ward Cunningham presenting…

My Sensors Love Node.js

Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham

Who’s Ward? In his own findings, “The Oregonian describes me as the Old Growth of the Silicon Forest. I appreciate the thought but move way too fast to be compared to trees. Think of me as your intellectual immune system separating good technology infections from bad. Ditch that fever. Go with node.”

As Ward describes this presentation, “I’ve tested a half-dozen home sensor integration technologies over as many years and learned something important about architecture with each generation. I’ve replaced Arduino hardware with Teensy which offers much better USB support. I’ve replace C++ with Perl then with Ruby/Sinatra and now Node/Wiki each time feeling the fresh air of a more friendly and dynamic environment. I’ve plotted results with ascii-art, java-2d, flot and now d3.js which can be a career in itself. I’ll share the good parts of each of these and suggest how you will know when it is time for you to move on.”

Nexxy presenting…

Realtime Hardware with Node.js

Nexxy
Nexxy

Key facts about Nexxy:

  • Nexxy has been hacking on things in one way or another SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.
  • Nexxy is also known for her occasional use of hyperbole as a literary device.
  • Nexxy first began hacking arduinos with node while she was working with a vegan strip club named Casa Diablo.
  • Nexxy is now enjoying her work with Ninja Blocks as they take over the world with the internet of things!
  • Nexxy inexplicably decided at the last second to write this section of the proposal in 3rd person, bullet form.

…and I have recreated this proposal section here for your information!

Join Nexxy & all for another installment of “Realtime Hardware with Node.js” as we take a look at just how exactly one should go about making a fool of themselves on stage with a bunch of electronics. We will cover the basics of getting started with hardware, demonstrate some cool tech, and conclude with a super rad (slightly hazy) and interactive dance party of epic (modest) proportions — if everyone cooperates. Questions are welcome throughout the presentation and audience members are encouraged* to participate.

* bribed with stickers

Jerry Seivert presenting…

Know Your Environment

Jerry Sievert
Jerry Sievert

Jerry is a conousier of fine beer, drinks and other assorted things. The relevant list of coarse includes Lego, trains and JavaScript. His own words of these things, being a drink or beautifully coded up application, “I love to build things!” summarizes up Jerry’s love of building perfectly!

Jerry will pose the question, “What if your software knew about its environment and could react?” With very basic electronics skills, and the ability to read a datasheet, you can be well on your way to a smarter and more responsive application. We will discuss some common hardware protocols and how to interface your code with them to build something all “teh aWeSOME“!

Hannah Fousanon presenting…

Optimizing Single-Page Javascript Websites for SEO

Hannah
Hannah

Hannah Fouasnon is a cofounder and lead engineer at DJZ based in San Francisco. While a full time hacker, she’s currently focusing on creating DJZ’s next single-page javascript website optimized around playing media and games. Former projects include Luckysort, a big-data, text-analytics company based in Portland, OR, where she implemented a large portion of the node.js architecture.

Hannah will cover how to create single-page javascript websites and enable developers to more easily support advanced web client features. For example, the persistent playing experience on soundcloud is supported by a single-page backbone.js architecture. One of the downsides when deciding on this architecture is that web crawlers have trouble indexing content, which can hurt seo and facebook sharing.

This presentation covers how we solve this problem at DJZ. The example will be a simplified angular.js application optimized for seo using primarily phantom.js. Viewers can follow along with code on github (link to come).

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

Have a last minute request, idea, comment or a speaking proposal? http://nodepdx.org/

Write the Docs, Railsconf Portland, RICON East, Node PDX, Vancouver Polyglot, Open Source Bridge and OSCON…

…if you are deciding what to attend this year, here’s the top of the list.

Just a few key conferences that will kick ass in technical & academic content. The other great thing about these conferences is that they either have a “code of ethics” or are reknown for real conference diversity vs. the “hey a bunch of privileged sameness all ended up in this room purely out of meritocracy” nonsense. So you can rest assured that at these conferences you’ll have interesting conversations, be actively involved in things that will expand our personal sphere of the world and in the end leave you dramatically more enriched than those “corporate warm body vacation conferences“. This list doesn’t mean I’ll be able to make it to all of them, but each conference I’m in some way intimately involved with and fully support with the “Conference Seal of Approval“! So here we go…

Write the Docs – April 8th and 9th – @writethedocs – A new movement, to know where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. Get here, know how and why to bring knowledge forth through documentation. This is not your grandpa’s documentation.

Portland RailsConf 2013 – April 29th-May 2nd – @railsconf – The rails community has grown by leaps and bounds. Regardless of your love or hate for the framework, it’s revolutionized the way web applications are built over the last decade.

RICON East in New York City – May 13th & 14th – @basho – (I do work for Basho, but this is on here because RICON last year ROCKED and meets the requirements, come see for yourself!)  🙂

Node PDX – May 16th & 17th – @nodepdx – Troy Howard and I are putting this together, we’re working hard to make sure it’s more of what you want, more than it was last year and kicking to the curb the things you don’t want. So come hack some node, JavaScript and enjoy yourselves.

Polyglot 2013 – May 24th through the 26th – @polyglotConf – Open spaces, with tons of really, truly smart people with no presumptuous marketing and sales bullshit to get in the way. This is about software development, across the realms of frameworks, languages and more.

OS Bridge – June 18th through the 21st – @osbridge – open source bridges the divide here and new thinking is created. You have to attend to see…

OSCON – July 22nd through the 26th – @oscon – This is the premier open source conference in North America. It’s in Portland. Nuff’ said.

I’ll be at a few more conferences this year, but these are the key conferences, if you have to pick one to go to, it should be on this list. If you can go to one or two others, pick em’ from this list. Software + Data + Giant Phat Data + NoSQL + Future Thinking + Leaders o’ Thoughts == Top Conference List.

See ya there. Cheers!

Portland, Oregon :: Riak Office Hours @ Nedspace

Today, albeit by obliviousness to the holiday, had scheduled “Riak Office Hours” at NedSpace today. Even with the holiday, we had a great turn out. Generally Office Hours & Open Hack type of meets are small, often 2-5 people. Today we had a whopping 10 people turn out!

Open Ended Topics

Each meet we have a variety of topics, from a tutorial on getting started with Riak to discussion around using Riak or Redis to cache data for Riak distributed across geographic regions.

Dark Horse Comics, read them in digital format or original formula, They ROCK!!

In the case today, we dove into the finer nuances of Dark Horse Comics and how their mobile apps use data across caching, tiered access, and on server and on mobile synchronization across the web application. All very interesting and provides insights not to just one person or team, but to anybody and everybody there involved in the conversations. There are lots of solutions to be had, the real problem is just getting to the right one.

Next to bat Ed Borasky, Github @znmeb and Twitter @znmeb and I discussed “Hacks & Hackers”. Ed works a lot these days with Node.js, all sorts of databases, and media collateral. He’s often found digging through data and will soon be digging through some Riak experimentation. For more on Ed’s work and efforts, check out Computational Journalism Publishers Workbench.

Riak Office Hours, Part III

The next Riak Office Hours is coming up on March 4th. To check it out, please RSVP, and even if you can’t make the office hours feel free to join the group to stay abreast of upcoming meetups, presentations, workshops or other events in Portland related to data, data science, distributed computing, Riak, Basho, Erlang, web machine and software in general. We have a good time and look forward to you joining the group. Cheers!

…and now back for my deluge of Erlang, Riak, C#, Node.js + JavaScript and whatever else…

RICON Hits the Airwaves

This last week has been a bit more exciting for a number of reasons than I expected and dragged out for a few other reasons. (shakes fist in air with frustration!)

RICON|East lands in New York City!

Last year, well before I was working for Basho, I signed up for RICON in San Francisco. RICON is a conference with the key intellects behind distributed computing, such as Eric Brewer (he’s slightly involved with that CAP Theorem) and many others. You can even get a taste of the conference since the presentations are online and available to watch anytime you’d like to. For this year in New York City we already have some great speakers lined up and more to come!

2013 Speakers as of now…  (stay tuned for more)

Camille Fournier @skamille – VP of Technical Architecture at Rent The Runway blogs at Elided Branches

Camille is going to provide attendees with some serious Apache ZooKeeper knowledge. She’s, as stated, VP of Technical Architecture at Rent the Runway. Rent the Runway is a NYC-based eCommerce startup that rents designer dresses and accessories. They operate systems that support a business with a unique combination of challenges, from those related to product discovery, to those related to reservation booking and pricing, to a warehouse fulfillment system that handles 100% returns.

The ZooKeeper topic I’ll leave entirely for her to fill you in on! So, among all the others, another talk you’ll want to come to RICON to hear!

Sean Cribbs @seancribbs – Software Engineer at Basho Technologies

Sean blogs at seancribbs, which sounds a bit redundant, but hey… he gets down to the business of writing about some really insightful things. We’re fortunate at Basho to have him hacking away on projects, and super stoked to be working along side him! One of his latest posts “Property Driven Grammer Development” is seriously worth a read. Be sure to check out Sean’s Github and come gain gray matter activity while Sean lays down some brain power.

Kyle Kingsbury @aphyr – Member of Technical Set => {A | A ∉ A}, blogs at Aphyr

Riot starter Kyle is coming back to RICON East. Last year Kyle brought some fire to the RICON Conference and this time he’ll bring some fire in full presentation format this time. I’m looking forward to hearing about whatever he’s going to enlighten us about. Cheers Kyle, welcome to the speaker line up!

Neha Nerula @neha – blog at Transient Neha

Neha is currently a PhD Student at MIT, but has serious cred from working at Digg & Google. She’ll have some content you’ll want to give an attentive listen to! Even though she’s not so transient, she’s been to more than a few cities to work in. Currently she’s at MIT and has worked on the Intelligence Initiative, BFlow, Intrusion Recovery for Database-backed Web Application, and a host of other papers and other projects.

The team is moving so fast, there’s more speakers announced already, and I’ll be giving a portfolio to each of them as they’re announced and as fast as I can type!

As for an example of what RICON is like, here’s a few of the videos from 2012 that I really enjoyed…

2012 Talks

Pattern of Innovation: Riak Usage at BestBuy.com – Joel Crabb, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

Keep CALM and Query On – Joe Hellerstein, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

Advancing Distributed Systems – Eric Brewer, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

Riak in the Cloud – Ines Sombra and Michael Brodhead, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

The Friday Wrap Up: Write The Docs, Basho Coworking Office Hours & Node PDX

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

The Riak Products; Riak, RiakCS and Riak EnterpriseDS
The Riak Products; Riak, RiakCS and Riak EnterpriseDS

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

Write The Docs
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!