Category: Software Projects

Junction Two Weeks on Tuesday Bi-weekly Review : Issue #001

So every two weeks I intend to provide an update for the Junction Project. Who might have joined, what was worked on, where we are and generally any other bits of news related to the project. This is the first “Junction Two Weeks on Tuesday Review” so enjoy!  🙂

  • Two weeks ago today I wrote the entry “Introducing Junction” to kick off the project. Everything is hosted on github via github pages at http://adron.github.io/junction/ and the git repository at https://github.com/Adron/junction. The video in which I described at a high level each of the sections of the application is located here: http://vimeo.com/adronhall/junction.
  • Clive Boulton @cliveb, Jared Wray @jaredwray, Kristen Mozian @kmozian and OJ Reeves @OJ joined the project to help out.
  • Issues, as stories and tasks were added to get started with the project. Here’s a first draft of the things we’re all working on. If you’d like to jump in, feel free to ping me and I’ll add you to the project, you can submit a PR (Pull Request) or talk to me about organizing a hackathon to help move the project forward.

Github Issues – Working Items

The easiest way to view these is to log into the Huboard Kanban Board and give a look see of what is in progress and who’s working on what. Currently I’ve outlined the big items that we’re working on and would love a fellow coder to jump in on. If you’re interested, ping me @adron or just jump into the issues list on Github (or view by milestone – i.e. functional area) and comment on the issue you want to dive into, I’ll add you so you can get started!

For the “Call the Doctor (Administration and Maintenance)” part of the application there are a number of questions to answer. How should we connect to Riak to ensure a secure SSH connection? Should we even use SSH? Is there another way to connect to the Riak Cluster for a secure way to administer the cluster?

In the “Golfing With Your Data (Query, Put, Deletes, Etc. Handling the CRUD)” one could dive into creating a functional query space to pull data out of a Riak Cluster. A lot of UI work needs to be done in this space, so if you’re up for putting together some awesome windows 8 interfaces, I’d love to hear from you!

Review Summary

At this point we’re moving forward. We’re always looking forward to new participants so reach out if you’re up for helping out!  So until the next two weeks are up, see ya at the Junction!

Getting Things Done! Coders Unite!

Over the last few years I’ve contributed to, organized, worked with, and been in the audience of hundreds of user groups throughout Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver BC. By far, this area of North America has the most active, resilient, and density of thought leaders in the technology world. There is something missing however and I’d like to start working toward filling this gap. What’s missing you ask?

Problem: People often get together and talk about tech, but rarely get together and do something about tech.

The vast majority of user meetups end up as presentations. I must sadly say, often boring presentations that don’t really teach or demo all that much. Attendees often just come to talk afterwards or otherwise socialize, which is hugely important to the community. However there has to be a way more could be done. A better outcome would be to create a two way conversation, instead of the one way presentation, and to involve ourselves in creating solutions, new technology, and idea. In a few rare situations I have found groups that do something about this void. What’s their solution?

Solution: They actually get together, implement code, pair, and work together on problems. Kind of like a Hackathon, but way more often.

That’s what I’d like to create. To start off with, I’d like a group that is technology agnostic, is fairly skilled yet willing to pair and bring others up to speed, and simply gets together at least once per month to implement a specific project or effort that is predetermined by group submission and conversation (i.e. we’ll use a google group, e-mail list, or such). I think, and feel like there is enough support to get something like this started in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco (especially here), and Vancouver BC. My question is though, would you be interested in helping out, coordinating with me, and otherwise uniting coders to do more, learn more, and better themselves?

If you are interested, please leave a comment and help me out by answering a few questions:

  1. Is “Coders United” a good name for the group? What ideas do you have?
  2. Do you have a project or three or four that may be of interest for a group to get together and work on?
  3. This type of group would probably need to meet for more than an hour, would you be able to meet for 3-4 hours, maybe even on a weekend to implement a full project?
  4. What’s your preferred method of contact (e-mail, twitter, facebook, text message?) and how should I get in touch with you?

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…


kwestinI 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 2011 Day #2

Day #2 kicked off a bit late for me. I arrived around 9:30am which was a bummer, but I at least got a bit of breakfast. The first session I went to was the reactive extensions session. Again though, I was late, so I ended up lost from the get go. That was unfortunate. In addition, all of my computers I brought were either unprepared (didn’t have a VM setup on the Mac yet) or broken (the Win7 box wouldn’t boot Windows Explorer anymore, thank goodness for Launchy). In spite of all that I got lunch with a host of devs at Black Raven Brewery. Absolutely great beer there!

After that the nitty gritty hacking finally got started! I attended the AppHarbor Session (@AppHarbor) given by the founders Michael (@friism) and Troels (@troethom) and decided to start a project myself. I immediately had some bad ass cohorts jump on the team! Eric Ridgeway, Ryan Eastabrook, and Joe Balfantz. We got started, in spite of massive OS and System Failures.

The project that we started is called Regiztry and is available via a repo on Github. The idea for this project actually started with a conversation I had with Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) several months ago. The idea is a contribution, or sharing system, to work with or help out startups. Keep in mind, they’re not all landing VC money! I’ll have more descriptions about how this project is going and better descriptions of it in the near future right here on Composite Code. If you’d like to help out startups, the project, or just code with some awesome people like Eric Ridgeway, Ryan Eastabrook, and Joe Balfantz then message me on Github me.

Anyway, that’s what I got for day #2.