A far as my usual trend, I often don’t double post and I usually do the normal #FF (follow friday or friend follow, whatever they call it) on twitter but then I decided “meh”. This will be a double post AND a not normal #FF. So here’s the list. Get those browser tabs working, this is a solid and consistent list of useful, interesting and insightful tweeterers. Wel, some of the tweeterers are full snark loaded tweeterers but still worth the follow. 😉
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.
What have I been up to? Here’s a quick recap. You may want to get involved with some of these projects!
Iron Foundry & Tier 3 Web Fabric
Back when I left the kick ass team at Russell Investments in Seattle I stepped directly to bat as team lead at Tier 3. My job, get a PaaS built on Cloud Foundry and extending that with Iron Foundry. It was an ambitious effort that would provide the most extensive framework and language support available from any PaaS Provider on the market.
Well, we did it, thanks to the capabilities of Cloud Foundry Community, the great minds of Jared Wray @jaredwray, Luke Bakken, Eric Lee @saintgimp, Cale Hoopes & the rest of the Tier 3 Team! I was able to add this to my list of successes. We had some bumps, some collisions, a brick wall or two and other scheduling problems – ya know, the standard things that happen on a project. But in spite of it all, we got the Web Fabric released – and it continues to be the only PaaS available with such a wide framework and language support. It ranges from Ruby on Rails, Erlang, Node.js & Java to .NET! If you’d like to check out the open source PaaS of Cloud Foundry & Iron Foundry both projects are always looking for participation & contributions!
Thor Brings the Hamma!
After the release of the Tier 3 Web Fabric I started the search for a wicked smart and capable OS-X / Cocoa Coder – it seems their availability is pretty limited these days! Well I finally lucked out and found Benjamin van der Veen (@bvanderveen, thanks for the intro Selena @selenamarie!) to help me get started on the Thor Projects. There’s the Cocoa Thor Project & the Windows 7 WPF Metro based Thor .NET Project that we’re wrapping up with v1 releases coming really soon. To check out more on these projects that I’ve lead & coded on check out the code bases & information, all linked on ironfoundry.org. The projects are open source, so feel free to jump in and help out or fork & submit pull requests. The team will be happy to review & discuss ASAP.
While we’re wrapping these projects up right now, I’ll actually be continuing on and supporting the projects: Thor & Thor .NET. I will continue to be involved, as I was saying, in a number of ways in the PaaS space. So don’t think I’m disappearing form that realm!
Basho Sings my Song
I’ve been keeping track of Basho for a while now. Riak caught my interest many months ago as a really well built, well thought out & advanced distributed database. As you might guess, being into the whole “cloud computing” industry, I’m just ever so slightly interested in distributed systems. The other thing that I’m a huge fan of, which Basho does, is heavily support and involve itself in the open source software community and movement. The icing on the cake, was their diverse use of systems and language use around Erlang. All things that are massive wins.
Bailey’s Taproom
Well during a random conversation with Eric @coderoshi at Bailey’s Tap Room & then attending the RICON 2012 Conference (article here and pictures) I spoke to some of the team and found out they were looking for some particular skill sets. Well it just happened that I was keenly interested in meeting those skill set requirements! So December 1st I’ll be joining the Basho team full time as developer advocate, evangelist, messenger or such for the northwest working with a few people you may know such as Mark Phillips @pharkmillups, Andy Gross @argv0 (thanks for the intro James @wattersjames), Eric Redmond @coderoshi, Shanley Kane @shanley, Casey Rosenthal @caseyrosenthal and many others. Simply, I’m freaking stoked.
How This Helps You Help Me Help You
Alright, so it’s great but how can I help you in your day to day? What data do you work with? Do you work with a data scientist? Are you a data scientist? Do you work with huge sets of data, many objects, large objects? I want to know about your data usage and data problems, because there’s a good chance we’ll have more than few things to discuss. Here’s some ways I can help you, help me, help you. Ping me if you’re interested in…
talking about your data usage at the monthly Riak user group.
coding, pairing & otherwise learning Erlang and the monthly Erlang group.
interested in coding, deploying and inventing new paradigms and patterns of data storage.
interested in pairing up to learn how to deploy, migrate, upgrade or otherwise use NoSQL solutions – namely Riak.
interested in Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Map Reduce, .NET, Java, PHP and how these things can and do work against data in everything from relational databases to the new echelon of NoSQL databases.
I hope to hear from you soon and see you at an upcoming user group, cheers!
Video Production is starting soon on a new hard core coder & tech video show. Done on the nitty gritty. It’s going to be about purely tech, code, more code, testing, coding, entrepreneurship in technology (not in general) and more of the hard core, nitty gritty, total hands down low down on the technology sector and technology scene. We’ll be diving into everything from enterprise technology to startup technology, who’s innovating and who’s stagnating, who’s kicking ass and who is enjoying the ride.
What I’d love from you, dear reader, is help with this question. What kind of content would you like?
That title sounds like a Dream Theater song or something. But alas, I’m going to try and answer the question for the next few weeks per my calendar of logistics.
September 10th (Monday) – September 14th (Friday) I’ll be in Seattle for networking, work and a few rounds. Maybe a geek lunch or two too, who’s up for it?
September 22nd (Saturday) I’ll be at the Portland Streetcar eastside Loop Party. Yeah yeah, it doesn’t really have anything to do with tech, but I’m a transit nerd, so gotta go see the new streetcar line.
October 8th (Monday) – October 17th (Wednesday) I’ll be in San Francisco for the RICON (A Distributed System Conference for Developers) and the HTML 5 Dev Conf (js, html5 and all that developer conference).
Thor & Cloud Foundry Hackathon & Installfest
Curious if anyone is up for meeting and doing an installfest or hacking on Cloud Foundry, Iron Foundry or checking out Thor this coming week in Seattle? Any takers? Leave a comment and I’ll also ping the people of the Twitterverse and App.net. I’m up for meeting at a coffee shop or other space and would be happy to come to an office or other environment if anyone is interested.
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