Geoloqi, CivicApps, and TriMet API/SDKs

I’m heading off on yet another coding adventure this coming weekend. I can never get enough hackathons, startup weekends, and such. The energy, creativity, and learning is unbeatable at these types of events. This adventure will be mashing up a plethora of APIs (SDKs) and other capabilities to build something cool against. What it may be, what it will be, I’ve no idea yet. But here’s a quick summary of the companies & entities involved.

First a quick review of Geoloqi and what CivicApps are, the key sponsors and organizers of the event.

Geoloqi – Development

Description: Geoloqi is a private, real-time mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data. We’re a company that believes in doing more with location, and creating useful services for people and businesses.

CivicApps
Description: The aim is social change. The path is regional collaboration. The focus is local.

Technology is changing our relationship with government. Not so long ago government made decisions with little public input. Those days are gone. Today, information technology has redefined the structure and authority of government. The problems our communities face are beyond the capacity of government to resolve alone. Cooperation, collaboration and openness are no longer questions of opportunity; they are essential means of conducting our community’s business effectively. Every citizen can be an active participant in reshaping their world. WE are the government.

The CivicApps.org site aims to encourage every citizen to be an active participant by putting the data in their hands. The CivicApps.org site was developed to source, profile, and accelerate innovative ideas using Web and mobile technologies. The aim is social change. The path is regional collaboration. The focus is local.
Beyond these two organizations there are a host of others that are putting forth support through either the hackathon or the CivicApps Efforts.

Here’s a list of the entities involved in the CivicApps Project, click on the respective image to learn more about each one. All of these, in some way, form, or manner have contributed data or otherwise to the CivicApps Data.

An elected regional government, Metro helps you make the region an extraordinary place to live, work and play. Metro serves more than 1.5 million residents in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties and the 25 cities in the Portland region. Some of the related data & maps they provide are covered here.

Our belief is that mass transit ridership can increase dramatically through improved customer service.

We’ll help by:

Empowering passengers with information about waiting time.
Providing Transit Authorities and operators with a robust, reliable, and cost-effective way to manage fleets and communicate directly with passengers.
Reducing the uncertainty associated with public transportation.

TriMet provides bus, light rail and commuter rail service in the Portland metro area. Our transportation options connect people with their community, while easing traffic congestion and reducing air pollution—making our region a better place to live. TriMet’s developer resources are available here.

…and others:

   
     

Stay tuned and I’ll have more on the hackathon and my project. Cheers!

Accidentally Monstrous Code Weekend++ Startup Weekend PDX++ Codez

This last weekend, extending into Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were a MASSIVE coding weekend and vacation for me. I initially left with the intent to basically just be lazy and not do anything in particular. Maybe write a little code, learn some more about Rails, RSpec, or Mongo DB. But hold, things changed!

I boarded the train down to Portland on Thursday of last week to attend the ALT.NET PDX Group at E-Discover (thanks E-Discovery for the space!). The meeting went great with a solid 10 people attending and contributing to some great conversation topics like; mongo db, migrations, windows 8, which way the cloud technologies are going, and HTML5 + CSS + Javascript came up more than once.

After that I had a full remote work day fighting with deployment of SQL Compact Edition. Even though Scottgu says you can deploy it with the magical bin deploy, I’ve found that to be absolutely NOT the case. It is unfortunate as I might have to rip something apart pending it isn’t actually going to work on SQL CE. As soon as the work day wrapped up around 4pm, I headed over for a short stay at Beer & Blog at the Green Dragon. After a beer, I was off to Urban Airship to check out this Startup Weekend that I’d managed to luckily get into. It all came about like this…


kwestin
I still have two free tickets to the sold our Portland
Startup Weekend….really surprised nobody has claimed them.

adron
@kwestin
Can I claim one? I was planning on going… but then saw they were sold out. 🙂

kwestin
@adron
sold! DM me your email address and I will have them set you up. It will be a great
event.

adron
@kwestin
Awesome! DM following.
Which of course set me on a course to go build startup stuff! I was stoked! Later in the week Silicon Florist – AKA Rick Turoczy followed up with a blog entry also.
I joined a team, that eventually built an idea around searching less and learning more, which we called Digischool.me. Kind of getting rid of the noise around an individual’s efforts to learn something online. Here’s our presentation at the round up at the end of Startup Weekend.
After the intense Startup Weekend I spent the next three days (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday) catching up on some personal projects and coding. Overall, a very productive vacation and also very relaxing.
I’m definitely sold on Startup Weekends as a a lot of run, and will be attending these in the future. So if you’re heading to one, let me know, we might just have to team up!

ALT.NET Portland

There is an upcoming ALT.NET Portland Meetup happening at e-Discovery in downtown Portland. The meetup is happening on the 13th of October. There are several ideas behind this meetup, but I’m going to lay out my personal reasons here.

I’m working diligently to distribute my skills in multiple development stacks. I use Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, node.js, EngineYard, Heroku, and other platforms aside from my current “getting paid” technology stack of ASP.NET MVC & associated tech. The reason is simple; .NET slowly but steadily appears to be dying a slow death everywhere except the Enterprise. Rails, Ruby, node.js, and JavaScript are the primary skills of more than 95% of startups. I’m determined to not get stuck holding the “Delphi” card. I like the bleeding edge of tech, the excitement behind the efforts to keep things moving forward. ALT.NET, has always represented that. In Seattle and Portland that effort seems to be faltering, even losing steam in some regards. I want to help change that. No matter how much I dive into Ruby on Rails and the other tech stacks, I doubt I’ll ever not be working with .NET in some way, form, or manner. So I’d like to work on keeping that enthusiasm going in addition to my other platforms that I work with.

…and thus, ALT.NET Portland Meetup on the 13th. Come have a conversation, a discussion, and maybe even a beer or three afterwards.

…and if you’re in Seattle, don’t forget we meetup every month on Saturday, which for some is a problem. If it is, check out Beer && Code or one of the other great meetups where technologies mix and coexist.

Cheers, and hope to see you at one of these great meetups sometime in the future.

Urban Lean Agile Tech Breakfast Meetup, Be There This Wednesday!

Are you hard core into technology and software development like Node.js, JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, .NET, Java, Clojure and more?

Do you like the ideas behind the agile manifesto, lean startup, kanban, and thinking outside of the box?

Are you digging that ASP.NET MVC Framework or waiting for the next ALT.NET meetup?

Loving that ease of Ruby on Rails to wow your user base with ease, to implement with Sinatra those clean JavaScript & jQuery enabled UX for your clients?

Want to talk shop, eat some grub, have a beverage, and get a nerd kick start in the morning?

In that case meet us for Urban Lean Agile Tech Breakfast Meetup at Mod Pizza @ 1302 6th Avenue @ 8 am on Wednesday, August 3rd.

Enough With the Cartoons, Time for Business

A lot has been going on lately and I’m still working diligently to get caught up from all the meet ups, hackath0ns, off the cuff dev sessions, conferences, and more! Truly chaos, but a lot of fun chaos.

I’ve also been working with NW Cloud to organize things here in the great north west! From Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and more. If it has to do with cloud computing and events, we’re probably connected in some way. So be sure to check out the NW Cloud Blog and also follow the @NWCloud Twitter account.

In other user group news, SAWSUG (http://www.sawsug.com) or “Seattle AWS User Group” is also coming under the NW Cloud umbrella.  So to check out upcoming SAWSUG meetings we’ll be setting up event listings in most of the regular places (meetup, eventbrite, etc) but the main listing and updates will be on the NW Cloud Site.  For SAWSUG we do have a specific twitter account though at @SAWSUG – so go, sign up, get the RSS and be sure to follow our @NWCloud and @SAWSUG Twitter Accounts.

As for other unrelated events and such… 

Mobile App Hackathon (Redmond)

I’m not going to be making this personally, but if you’re into mobile app dev you should check it out.  This is put on by AT&T with guests like Apigee, so it should be a great time.

OSCON

I have an ad over to the right. I generally won’t post any ads, but this is for OSS and OSCON just isn’t really distractive from the core content I post here. It seemed like it would work out just fine to mix in with my regular array of things. If you’re going to OSCON, I’ll be there the whole week; coding, writing, and hanging out around town. So ping me via Twitter (@adronbh) and we’ll hook up for a round of beer, a coffee, or whatever we may.