This coming Wednesday I’m aiming for a Riak Beer Hack. Yup, it’s right after the Riak Nerd Lunch in Seattle. Thanks Amtrak Cascades for the ability to get from Seattle to Portland with wifi and not missing a beat! Train travel for the win!
Sample Appropriate Beer & Coffee Swag
At Bailey’s my intent is to bring a deployed Riak Environment and we’ll work – stepping through from the beginning – of connecting an application to the Riak back and and research the latest Beer APIs and discuss things to build like the Digital Pour Dashboard/Menu while enjoying some of the best beer in Portland at Bailey’s Taproom.
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
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
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.”
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.”
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!
Here’s a few of the meetups I’m going to aim to attend this month. Hope to see some fellow coders there.
PADNUG…
…is having a TypeScript Introduction. There’s a lot of those made up marketing words thrown around in the description such as “Application-Scale JavaScript Development”. Maybe TypeScript is magic, but overall it seems to be suspicious. Also, this talk is about how TypeScript will help you write Windows 8 Apps, so you’ve been warned. The kool-aid will be in effect. If you want to learn more about it, go check out the PADNUG meetup on January the 8th at 6:00pm. Intel Hawthorn Farms 3 (HF3) Campus, 5200 NE Elam Young Parkway, Hillsobor, OR 97124.
Portland Ruby Brigade…
…is having their regular monthly meetup at Crowd Compass. If you want to know more about the topic, material or other information about the user group jump into the Google Group to get started. This is a very fluid and flexible group, sometimes having an open discussion, a presentation or some other type of event. Crowd Compass, 2505 SE 11th Ave, #300, Portland, OR 97202. The location is in the Ford Building, with the easiest access straight in to the Ford Food & Drink.
Portland Riak Users Group…
…will meet at AppFog (as of this time) at 6:30pm on January 28th, more info & address on the meetup page. We have a coder/hacker/databaser by the name of Jeremiah Peschka @peschkaj coming in to tell us about the open source project he and OJ @TheColonial have been working on called Corrugated Iron. Corrugated Iron is a .NET Client for Riak, so holds a lot of potential for .NET shops to get into the distributed database world. So come check out the meetup, we’ll be having pizza and likely a bucket full of beer!
There are others, but these are the events that caught my eye. Check them out, I might see you there and if not, let me know how they go. If you’re looking into some other meetups or events, check out Calagator, the Portland Tech Scene Calendar of events. 🙂
The inaugural Riak Meetup kicks off tomorrow at 7:00pm. The crew at AppFog will be hosting the meetup, with several of the Basho team coming into town with two talks:
7:15pm – Eric Redmond @coderoshi will present “Next Generation Searching with Yokozuna“. Riak Search was created to expand Riak’s query options. It’s worked well enough the past couple years, but it’s time to move forward. Yokozuna is the next generation of Riak search, built on the solid Distributed Solr platform. We’ll see a preview of what Yokozuna does, what it’s going to do, and how that’s a marked improvement from the existing Riak Search.
8:00pm – Nathan Äschbacher, developer at Coradine, will present “Riak & Node.js: The Hunt for Cheap, Easy Nines“. Portland-based Coradine makes an innovative aviation application that helps pilots the world over. Riak will power the next generation of apps and services coming out of Coradine. Nathan Äschbacher, developer at Coradine, will take you through:
A quick history of our experience with Riak
How it came to be we opted to use it at Coradine
Some of the known hurdles we were going to have to overcome (like cloud deployment)
Some of the development issues we’ve encountered
Why Node.js was a good fit for us and interfacing with Riak
Abandoning Redis in favor of Riak Memory-store for caching and 2i
So if you’re into airplanes, data, big and small, giant 9’s or other technical aspects around data storage and the respective distributed systems that enable advancements in this technology, come down to AppFog this Monday and check out these presentations.
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.
At Bailey’s my intent is to bring a deployed Riak Environment and we’ll work – stepping through from the beginning – of connecting an application to the Riak back and and research the latest Beer APIs and discuss things to build like the Digital Pour Dashboard/Menu while enjoying some of the best beer in Portland at Bailey’s Taproom.
Nóirín Plunkett Plunkett AKA 
Kenneth Reitz AKA 
Jim R. Wilson AKA 
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