Category: Conferences

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!

I Messed Up, Cascadia.js Kicked Ass, Defrag Conversations Continued Without Me!

I wasn’t able to get to Cascadia.js. Sometimes during the course of working smart and hard one misses the smart part and scheduling falls apart. Well, I messed up. I messed up and my scheduling got completed dorked for the last two weeks. What did that result in? I missed Cascadia.js, a codeathon in Spokane that I was putting together and to top it off I was missing Defrag in Denver – which really put me out because I was out of pocket personally for Defrag. Altogether it was a financial, logistical and scheduling nightmare for me.

To all, I apologize for my lapse in scheduling prowess!

Amid all of this mess, I’ve got some great new things coming up in the coming week for the OSS Projects I’m working on, the north west, a little emerald for Seattle, some earthy stuff for Portland and all around interesting tidbits here and there.

Before I go rambling on about those things, I wanted to leave this pre-weekend before Thanksgiving with some shout outs to the Cascadia.js Team & Presenters. Carter, Troy, Luc, Jerry, Laurie, Bobby & the whole lot of the team that put that together – you guys seriously ROCK!

The conference had a number of speakers, who totally rocked it, and here’s a few of my first views. I wasn’t there, as I said, so I was seriously stoked that the team put the videos online.

Angelina Fabbro @AngelinaMagnum presents

Matt Padwysocki @mattpodwysocki presents

Jason Denizac @leJden presents

Rick Waldron @rwaldron presents

Emily Rose @nexxylove presents

…and there ARE MORE PRESENTATIONS at Cascadia.js on youtube. Check them out, each is a blast!

Pull Request for People by Chris Williams

@voodootikigod <- but don’t look for him on Twitter… watch the ending keynote of his. It’s really good and we all need to think about what he is saying, seriously think about what he’s saying.

As for some of his questions he asks, I’ll have some answers to that – which I could indeed rattle off quickly, in response. I do say though, I don’t provide these answers to counter what he is saying. I do so only to state and reaffirm what he talked about. I am absolutely, 100% in agreement with what he is saying about the current state of the startup & tech sector.

With that, I’m going to spend some time with friends. Maybe even make some new ones. Cheers! 🙂

…as for Defrag, I’ll have more about that in the coming days too.

Lists of Lists of Lists: Conferences

RICON 2012
RICON 2012

This is the first in a series (AKA a list) of lists that I’m researching and putting together. I’ve had many questions in the last few weeks for “cool conferences”, “awesome hackathons”, “meetups” and “conferences that are worth the time” and related. So here’s the conferences list so far, I’ll be adding more on my conferences page over time. If you’re looking for the most updated list, check out that page. Here’s what others & I have collected so far. Thanks to everyone on twitter, facebook and those other places we’ve discussed conferences:

Github: @adron
Github: @adron

Developer Conferences

  • OSCON
  • Qcon London
  • Qcon San Francisco
  • HTML 5 Developers Conference
  • Web 2.0
  • Velocity Conf Beijing
  • Velocity Conf Santa Clara
  • Strata Conf Santa Clara
  • Strata Conf London
  • Strata Conf Boston
  • Strata + Hadoop World (NYC)

    OSCON (Red Hat table)
    OSCON (Red Hat table)
  • Fluent Conf (San Francisco, CA)
  • Portland Code Camp
  • Seattle Code Camp
  • San Francisco Code Camp
  • Node Conf
  • Node Summit
  • Node PDX
  • Ruby on Rails Conf
  • Cascadia Ruby Conf
  • Strangeloop
  • Defrag / Glue
  • Mobile Web Development Conference
  • Mozilla Festival

    Checking out awesome new tech with Dave McCrory at VMworld
    Checking out awesome new tech with Dave McCrory at VMworld
  • RubyWorld Conference
  • Software Craftsmanship
  • Øredev
  • Monktoberfest
  • RICON
  • Symposium on OS Design and Implementation (OSDI)
  • USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST)
  • High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS)
  • ACM Symposium on OS Principles (SOSP)
  • BUILD 2012
  • Railsberry
  • Mix12 – Microsoft
  • RealtimeConf
  • Azure Conf
  • DeployCon
  • AWS re: Invent
  • Cloudbeat
  • Structure
  • CloudConnect
  • TacoConf

To add to this list, check out the Google Docs Worksheet I’ve setup or check out the conferences page. The later I will update regularly whenever there are updates to the Google Docs Spreadsheet.

I don’t often ask for RT, tumblr, reddit or other links, but would love to see how big the list can become, so if you have a second please link it, retweet it, like it on facebook or Google+ and get it out there. Thanks!

Updated on Wednesday the 7th of November, 1:37pm 2012
Last Updated 4:41pm on Wednesday the 7th, November of 2012. For the most up to date list check out the conferences page.

JSConf EU

In light of the upcoming Cascadia.js Conf I was digging around last night through some of the other JavaScript Conference videos and found the JSConf EU’s listings on Youtube. Here’s a few picks from the ones I watched. I’d highly advise checking these out, there’s a lot of great content there. With that quick introduction, here’s Max, Irene and James. Cheers!

Max Ogden @MaxOgden provides reasons how to help Government work better through various means…  absolutely great talk. Check it out.

Irene Ros @ireneros combining practices we’ve had for years into a better way to get data.

James Halliday (@substack and github) UNIX Philosophy and…  just watch this, James is kick ass and contributes a ton to the #nodejs community.