One of the things that I do in my work is lead the efforts around creating and leading open source projects. As regular readers may know, I’m big into open source efforts, especially around PaaS. My preferred PaaS offering these days for internal, external and public cloud PaaS is Cloud Foundry (with Iron Foundry for all of my .NET needs). Today the we made the projects official and I’m charging forward with a a great team of people. You’ll be able to use these new user interfaces for Cloud Foundry against Tier 3 Web Fabrics, CloudFoundry.com, Stackato, AppFog and any other company that uses Cloud Foundry at the core and exposes the web service APIs for use!
Thor & Thor.NET
In a couple weeks we’ll be making the github repositories completely public, open sourcing the code & products entirely and looking forward to working with the community to make these tools as awesome as we can. For now, if you’d like to jump into the repositories and see where we are and what we’re up to as we step toward opening them completely, sign up via “early access“. We’ll get you setup on the repo so you can fork, pull and add you’re own signature bits.
Why did we name the project Thor? Well, we’ve been spearheading the Iron Foundry Community efforts for .NET support on Cloud Foundry so we figured we needed someone to bring the hamma to the battle, nobody better than Thor for that!
I’m aiming to do over the first couple of months of 2013, to come to various towns throughout the United States and prospectively parts of Europe & England to code, bike, code some more, bike and generally hang out with the coders that are making waves and getting work done in the particular cities that I’m visiting. That’s where my question comes into play.
What towns should I visit, and who’s interested in hacking some code, talking shop, biking around town, showing me the places to be and generally hanging out? A few of the cities that are on my list of places to visit already include the following.
United States Stops
Spokane, Washington
Seattle, Washington
Portland, Oregon (this doesn’t really count, since I live here)
Oakland, California
San Francisco, California
Los Angeles, California
Orange County, California
San Diego, California
Austin, Texas
Phoenix, Arizona
New York, New York
Boca Raton, Florida
Jacksonville, Florida
New Orleans, Louisiana,
Charlotte, North Carolina
England & Europe Stops
London, England
Edinburgh, Scotland
Berlin, Germany
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Copenhagen, Denmark
So that’s the list so far. I’ve got a lot of logistics to figure out. But it still leaves the question, who else is up for a visit? Is there a user group in your town that I should stop at? Anything related to PaaS, Cloud Computing, or Coding & Software Craftsmanship you’d like me to come speak about?
The things I’ll be aiming to hack on and blog, code, discuss and find out what each local community is focusing on and trying to make progress on includes these things:
Key Discussion Topics : I’d love to talk with as many people as possible about these.
PaaS – Platform as a Service Technologies. What are you using? AppHarbor, AppFog, Tier 3, AWS, Azure or something else?
Cloud Computing – What do you see as the greatest benefits, but more importantly what are the greatest issues to resolve and make progress around in your country, community and in your day to day job?
What’s the stack, framework and languages that you deal with on a daily basis? What’s your polyglot soup and what trends are you seeing?
Polyglot Soup : Are you hitting the Node.js, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra or is the focus elsewhere?
What’s the feel for Ruby on Rails, Sinatra and the ruby community in general in your area?
How’s the Java vs. .NET peacetime activities (cuz ya know the war is over). How are each holding up under Oracle and Microsoft respectively? Are you still using them anywhere?
What’s the Node.js community like in your area? Are you doing full JavaScript stack development yet?
Hitting any of the outlier languages that have big impacts like; Go, Scala, F#, Erlang or any of the others? Powerful languages with an extremely small development community. I’m always curious about the activities here.
Feel free to send me an e-mail, call me, txt me, message me, skype me, or please comment below! I’m open to all ideas and thoughts. If you have a couch I can crash on, have a suggestion about a cool hotel, an awesome place to visit in one of these cities, please let me know. Over the next few months I’ll be trying to figure out this tour of mine and will be finalizing the locations soon, which I’ll announce and blog heavily on what we’ll hack, etc. I’ll also alude to the biking adventures I’ll partake upon.
The bikes of OS Bridge Attendees, we’re cool like that… (Click for full size image)
Today was the kick off of OS Bridge 2012. I jumped aboard my trusty steed (bicycle) for the mighty 6 block ride to the conference. Yeah, I could have just walked, but I just felt like getting their the fastest way possible. After arriving I was immediately faced with two great greetings. The first one went like this.
The “Do you do .NET still” Introduction
Hey Adron, how are you?
I’m good, and you?
Doing well, hey… so are you still doing that .NET stuff?
OS Bridge 2012
Funny how after all this time of using JavaScript, working with Node.js, Ruby, deploying with Sinatra and Rails and even tweaking around with Objective-C that I still get this question. I’ve branched out, I’m not a limited, mono-language, mort Microsoft programmer. Technically I never have been, I’ve always had a passion for things besides the Microsoft ‘just feed me’ stack. It just happened to pay my bills for a while. What is really happening here though, to paraphrase, is someone asking “so are you working with any interesting problems these days?”
The sad fact that most programmers, even people who code with .NET everyday, feel and observe almost nothing interesting happening in the .NET stack these days. Generally almost no startups use it. The vast majority of scientists don’t. Overall there isn’t much of it in colleges either these days. All for a deluge of reasons.
Rest assured, I’ve observed this, and this is merely a single reason that I commonly use many other languages. This is the reason I never get mad when people ask me this. I understand the preloaded context, it’s ok. Microsoft & their communities did this to the .NET stack, it’s unfortunate.
The simple truth is that many companies trying to solve hard problems, do genomic research, figure out how to launch rockets, and other really exciting interesting problems use almost anything except Microsoft’s stack. So yes, I’m doing .NET stuff, but I do a ton of other things based on what the job requires. I’m a firm believer of using the right tool for the job, and sometimes that is indeed .NET. So what was my answer?
Yeah, still doing .NET. Along with Node.js with JavaScript, Ruby, working on learning some Scala, how to test better in Javascript and Ruby, and even trying to schedule myself some time to jump into Go!
Yup, I was more prepared for this question than I was in the past.
The next introduction that came at me was much simpler.
Hey Adron, how goes things?
Things go well
What is it you do these days? I know you’re working with Iron Foundry and blog with New Relic sometimes, but what do you actually do besides that?
I went on to explain my rather exhaustive range of work I do. Ranging from the coding to the organizational community things. All good stuff that led our conversation down different routes.
Both of these introductions went well and I dig both of them, albeit I need a pre-printed response to the .NET question. Breakfast muffins were great and then the several hundred people at the conference went to find seats in the main sanctuary room for the keynote.
The first session I attended was the session on Nginx by Cliff Wells (@cliff_wells). A few notes from this session:
NGINX is the #2 web server. (Really? I figured it was Apache and then… hmmm, maybe this IS true.)
Get a static file serving boost from NGINX, ala, don’t make Node.js serve your static files. (Yup, know this all too well now.)
NGINX cannot spawn processes and cannot block. (This is not Node.js, which is a good thing, it does the other work.)
There were a few other bits, but those were the main takeaways. The main reason I jumped into this session was because I wanted a more context around what NGINX is exactly. I got some of this, which is handy to know since this server is used in so many projects I’ve been working recently. Specifically it is readily used in Cloud Foundry.
This talk seemed like a keen match to a lot of the work I do. I’m remote for about 90% or more of my work these days. I code remotely, work up blog entries, articles, media calls, and related communications all from locations that are remote from their point of presence.
…errr, well, I tried to attend this one. Some work coding priorities trumped the evening session so I had to jet out of the conference. I did, as I coded away, kept an eye on all the tweets coming from the conference. It sounded like a great session. I have, unto the topic, a whole lot more to add. So maybe I can just spawn this into a blog entry at some point.
With that, have no fear, I’ll be back tomorrow for day #2 & the respective coverage of the event!
I usually don’t post two blog entries in one day, but I had so much to rattle on about it seemed like a rule to break.
DeployCon, Cloud Expo and Cloud Bootcamp
I’ll be speaking at the Cloud Bootcamp at the Cloud Expo in New York City. So if you’re coming to the conference, swing by and let’s talk PaaS and the future of software development and cloud computing. I’m looking forward to the event, it’ll be a good time and has a lot of educational content.
Also during Cloud Expo, be sure to check out the DeployCon. The DeployCon Conference is a PaaS Conference put together by Rishidot Research. Check out more information here.
Iron Foundry
Over on the Iron Foundry Project we’re going to be putting together some new material on what’s next, where we are on the project and where we are headed. The effort will be pushing forward with some possible hackathons or installathons for those interested. So if anyone is keen on checking out the latest and greatest of .NET PaaS options available, send me an e-mail and we’ll start coordinating some efforts.
Robotech
Yeah? Do you know the designation of the fighter type?
So why am I bringing up animated Anime from the 80s? Well, I was a pretty huge fan of the series, played the RPG, and own a few of the toys. Which yes, puts me in the nerd realm all that much more.
Know what this is?
For the next few months I’ve decided that we’re going with Robotech for code names of our projects. Who is “we”? I mean that in the sense that any and all projects I’m working on are going to be prototype names from Robotech. So if you notice a Robotech theme going on, that’s the reason.
Action Shots
As promised, action shots…
…the Destroids stand guard over Portland and the Zentraedi onslaught. Just my creative dorky side.
May has been insane. I’ve spent a total of about 3 days of the entire month where I live in Portland, OR. It’s kind of an odd feeling to try not to travel since I love it so much. But I’m going to try and take it easy this month and next. Especially since some kick ass conferences and code camps are happening right here in Portland (and Seattle) which helps me spend some quality time right here with Stumptown (that’s a nick name for Portland btw). So here’s a run down of the crazy action happening in June and July. There are lots of events and I’ve got lots of things coming your way!
PDX & SEA Code Camps
I just wrapped up speaking at Portland Code Camp. Again, thanks for coming out and hearing about PaaS Technologies, Cloud Foundry, Tier 3, AppFog, AppHarbor, Continuous Deployment, Integration, and all the things that have been pushed forward with Platform as a Service!
At the upcoming Seattle Code Camp on June 16th I’ll be providing 3 presentation, or workshops, or sessions, or whatever you may want to call them. Here’s a quick blurb about these, if interested, head down and I’ll make sure you get into the presentation workshop sessions. Also note the schedule, which no, I did not make the schedule so I apologize ahead of time that I will be talking about Node.js at the mind numbing early hour of 8 am.
Node.js Rulz! JavaScript takes over the full stack! => From the client side with some jQuery action to the back end with Node.js, with a touch of JavaScript Object Notation . JavaScript is everywhere these days and simplifying our lives. In this session I’ll run the full stack, with a live example, deployed to a live environment to show how JavaScript is freeing us from the constraints of the traditional development environment.
Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service=> This session will cover the major advances of platform as a service technology, what’s available in the OSS space to enable faster, easier, higher quality software development cycles in the cloud. The session will complete with a demo of PAAS technology in use, deploying a highly scalable, distributed & dispersed web application.
Putting it All Together, Letting Apps Lead the Cycle, TDD In The Cloud => I’ll be taking a deep dive into cloud architectures and how to build applications, generally at the PaaS level mixed with a little IaaS, to get people rolling with high velocity, high quality, and without the need to worry about the little things. Want to learn about why PaaS and cloud computing is altering the very fabric of the development cycle? Want to know how to dive in with some abstractions and behavioral practices on the cloud, using PaaS, to bring apps, prototypes, and UX to market faster than anyone else? I’ll be touching on all of these things during this long form session. The sessions will step through these core concepts and ideas.
OS Bridge
Ouch, they didn’t pick any of my sessions. :'( Well, even though I wasn’t selected to present I will absolutely be at OS Bridge and you should be too! So if you can get into Portland between the 26th and 29th of June make the endeavor! There will be great networking, sessions and you get an excuse to hit up Portland’s awesome Cart Selection of exquisite food (if you haven’t been here, I’m NOT kidding, it is indeed epic!). Be sure to say hello or let’s pair up on some code or hack some PaaS apps.
OSCON
I’ll be attending OSCON, probably coding all the while. I’ll be reporting on a number of things, specifically the Cloud Track:
Rid the MAX to OSCON, from downtown, or the airport, or…
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/topic/805. If you’re going to be attending, again, ping me and we’ll meet and maybe build something, maybe start a twitter flame war and correct everything on the web, or something of that sort. Worse case scenario we’ll grab a beer and have some rocking conversations about OSS, Cloud Tech, and more.
Part II of this blog entry is coming a little later today… so stay tuned for Robotech, Iron Foundry and all types of code action.
One of the things that I do in my work is lead the efforts around creating and leading open source projects. As regular readers may know, I’m big into open source efforts, especially around PaaS. My preferred PaaS offering these days for internal, external and public cloud PaaS is Cloud Foundry (with Iron Foundry for all of my .NET needs). Today the we made the projects official and I’m charging forward with a a great team of people. You’ll be able to use these new user interfaces for Cloud Foundry against Tier 3 Web Fabrics, CloudFoundry.com, Stackato, AppFog and any other company that uses Cloud Foundry at the core and exposes the web service APIs for use!
Thor & Thor.NET
Alolita Sharma 
Larissa Shapiro 
kalium 
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