Category: Unknown Code Ramblings

The Idea of .NET Fringe…

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write up some thoughts on the coming .NET Fringe Conference here in Portland. Being held at the Bossanova Ballroom it’s not your normal tech conference – being that Troy Howard, Glenn Block, the team, and I wouldn’t be putting on a corporate style conference – we’re community grassroots hard core. There’s going to be some hard core tech conversations about the direction of .NET, and hard core conversations about so many of the open source aspects of that tech stack.

With topics ranging widely, one of the topics that really has interested me is the Akka .NET framework for a multitude of reasons. Partly because I’ve already played around with the original Akka Framework and have worked with Erlang. For more on their connectedness, check out actors for Akka and Erlang and dive actor model, passing and into the respective concurrency searches.

But as I started to write up thoughts about what I hoped to learn, experience, and who I wanted to meet and discuss these things with at .NET Fringe …  a host of blog entries appeared over the last few weeks mirroring many of my thoughts.

Christos Matskas @christosmatskas

Guess Who’s Attending & Speaking at .NET Fringe?

Last night, I spent over 3 hours on Skype with Glenn, who took time off his busy schedule to help me arrange tickets, accommodation, visas etc and stayed on until he was certain I was all sorted for my trip. He deserves more than a big thank you and I will make sure I convey my gratitude when I shake his hand in person!

As I’m writing this, I can barely contain my enthusiasm counting the hours to my first trip to the US and my first conference outside Europe.

Glenn Block @gblock

.NET Fringe – Defining the Future

There’s too many examples to name all but I’ll list a few recent projects that illustrate this : jQuery, NuGet, Github,JSON.NET, Automapper, Xamarin, NancyFX, and .NET vNext. This is just a sampling that does not do justice as there are many many other examples.

This change is important. This is just the beginning, but it’s a great beginning. A group of us think this is so important, that we’re putting together an event focused on this topic, .NET Fringe.

We’re bringing together members of the .NET OSS community that have been working to define the future. They are going to share their works, share their learnings, and share their passion. And it’s happening in Portland, a place rich in OSS culture.

Itamar Syn-Hershko @synhershko

.NET Fringe Let’s Build a Stronger Community Around OSS & .NET

For many years now the .NET framework and its ecosystem are viewed as a Microsoft thing, where its a product by a company and you either opt to use it (on Windows servers only) or not. Unlike other ecosystems, the community seemed to have no control over the direction the technology takes; the community has to align with Microsoft’s view which, as you’d expect, isn’t always what the users wanted.

While it was true for many years and some of it still is, things are changing. Many Microsoft projects are now open-source, on github, and accepting Pull Requests. A lot of development is now happening in the open, in that context the weeklyASP.NET Community Standup deserves a mention.

Microsoft is changing, for real. It is my belief that we, as a community, need to step up and strike while the iron is hot to shape the future of the .NET ecosystem.

Iris Classon @IrisClasson

Welcome to .NET Fringe in Portland Oregon

Instead of a quote, I’ll just let Iris’ do the talking…   😉

Shawn Wildermuth @shawnwildermuth

.NET Fringe is Coming!

As many of you know, I’m not in the country at the moment but if I were, I’d be going to.NET Fringe in Portland, Oregon on April 12-14th. This new conference is all about open source in the .NET space and I and really excited that a conference is focused on it.

I have a couple of small, older .NET open source libraries, but my real facination has been with where the overall community is going. Both Microsoft and the community at large are all going open source and it’s great news for us all I think.

Great New European Technology Invention

One of the things that I’ve noticed throughout Europe is this really cool invention they’ve created here called a schedule. This schedule is something that is based on another piece of technology called a clock. The clock is designed to show the passing of time, something very similar to what we in America have, except that they pay attention to this passing of time. We Americans just seem to race around it in what we call the “rat race”.

This clock progresses forward while people work, relax and interact with each other. It ticks slowly and this is where the real interesting aspect of this technology is shown. As the time passes the European people eat and enjoy each other’s company. They tell each other a particular time, that each of them will show up and greet each other. They then carry on with their day and then meet at this time and enjoy a bit of each other’s company. For some odd reason it seems we Americans just go toward each other randomly and sometimes run into each other for company. But we don’t dare actually follow or respect this passing of time.

The other use of this schedule technology, is the use in transportation. It’s so fascinating that when a schedule in Europe shows that a train will arrive at 14:29 or 9:11 the train arrives at the respective 14:29 or 9:11. The same for this schedule of departure times. It is, unlike the lack of any schedule in America, amazingly useful. It seems, we could really use such a piece of technology in the United States!

The shock of the accurate movement of peoples between places, based on these schedules and their interactions is truly amazing! I highly suggest everybody give it a try sometime!

Coder Brad Heller, Cloudability & Riak

This coming April 29th (Monday) we’ll have Brad Heller coming in to give us the low down on how Cloudability has used Riak (click link meetup event). He sent me a short list outline of the topics he plans to hit. Here’s a few key data problems they’ve run into and how they’ve solved those problems with Riak & other solutions.

@Cloudability

    • What does Cloudability do?
    • Why do we like Riak?
    • Challenges of raw storage in our data pipeline.
  • Idempotency
  • Scale
  • Reliability
    • S3 vs. Riak
  • Queryable S3
  • Maintain “State”
    • Data Pipelines: Specific problems.
    • Idempotency
  • What has been processed?
  • How to figure out what to reprocess?
    • Scaling this.
  • Pipelines scale horizontally
  • Backpressure / failure modes
    • How do we use Riak to address these?
    • Raw data goes directly in Riak (metadata record, raw data record)
    • 2i on metadata record to find what needs processing
    • 2i on metadata record to find stuff to reprocess.
    • Atomic writes: Let Riak assign keys.
  • Duplicate Data is OK, idempotency maintained further down the chain.
  • Don’t worry about collisions–last one wins.
  • Predictable keys are helpful though.
    • Scale is built in!!
  • Read/write throughput gets better with more nodes.
    • What we don’t use.
    • Online MapReduce.
    • Only use for backoffice processes
  • When something isn’t indexed, identify bad data.
  • Add index.
    • Key filtering
  • Riak craps it’s pants.
    • Problems we’ve had
    • Ops is easy, but lots of unexpected behavior.
  • Riak eats all memory, craps it’s pants.
    • Erlang is hard.
  • Everyone on our team hates Erlang except me (Brad).
  • Stacktraces will confuse you a lot at first.
    • Riak is “expensive” compared to S3.
  • We run a ring of 5 m1.xlarge with EBS + provisioned IOPS.

That covers all the topics Brad wants to cover, which I’m sure that brings up a lot of questions already! So the presentation will be great and we’ll be sure to have a good chunk of time for questions and a few beers afterwards!

For more on Brad, give a follow on twitter @bradhe and endorse him for random skill sets like dishwasher programming and coffee cup holding on LinkedIn! Also you can read

Check out Cloudability for keeping tabs on your cloud compute spending. They are the leaders in helping companies manage their spend across many cloud offerings including AWS, Github, Heroku, Softlayer, Engineyard and others.

A Conversation on Cloud Computing, PaaS, Distributed Systems & Marketing Message Cleanups…

This video is a discussion between Ben Kepes @benkepes, Clive Boulton @ic, Rakesh Malhotra @rakeshm and Sam Johnston @samj. We tackle recent cloud computing trends, PaaS, distributed systems and cleaning up messaging around the mess marketing has made of “cloud”.

Massive Recording from Adron Hall on Vimeo.

Node PDX => Possible Speakers?

I started writing this blog entry about a month ago. I had not ran it by my friend Troy, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t jump the gun. However, I’d sort of let this entry get a little dusty, and Troy @thoward37 on twitter inadvertently brought up the topic and I’ve sprung this

So here it is, consider this blog article my Node PDX 2013 get the ball rolling article. Last year we (Troy, I and a team of volunteers, thanks everybody, ya’ll ROCK!) managed to put together, what we’ve been told was a totally kick ass conference, for zero cost to the conference goers, with great speakers, live video feeds and post conference videos and we did it all in about 3 weeks (maybe it was 3 weeks and 2 days). It’s how we roll, hard core, serious and dedicated to what we create and what we push forward for the community.

This year isn’t going to be an exception, only in that we’re going to give ourselves a bit more than 3 weeks. We haven’t set a date for the conference yet, but we’ll be doing that soon. What I want to throw out there is – who should we bring in to speak this year? I have a few people I’ve seen speak, or know that I’d like to hear speak and wanted to mention them right now and I apologize if this is forward, because I haven’t even spoke to them about it. So this blog entry is a complete surprise to them – so don’t set any expectations yet! Additionally, even though I want to see these individuals speak, that doesn’t mean I’m circumventing our process we used last year. Speakers will indeed have to make a git pull request against our Node PDX Github repo just like we did before.  🙂

With that said, hopefully we can get dates and times set so that these more excellent individuals and a host of others can come and speak this year, enjoy some Portland, have a beer/coffee/donut/yerba mate/ or two on us and have a great time!

Kelly Somers – I’d love to hear Kelly come into PDX and give us the lowdown on some big data, distributed systems & JavaScripty libs that help us tie all that together beautifully.
Blog: http://kellabyte.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kellabyte

Max Ogden – This guy is hard core, seriously, coding his way around the world and getting people involved. He’s been at more civic hacks and helped connect cities in more ways than I knew one could. It’d be awesome if he could swing into town and inform us about some of those connections. (Plus, maybe we can get some proper metal thrashin’ & a guest appearance for the sound track on the upcoming hard core coder show.
Blog: http://maxogden.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxogden
Github: https://github.com/maxogden

Chris Williams
Twitter: Chris got off of Twitter, yet the account still exists, to focus on the things that are important – namely real life, family and people. I totally support him in his efforts. For more about Chris, check out and follow the JSConf circuit. You’ll find him organizing the hell out of the conferences and making them awesome while keeping the negativity on the run!

Angelina Fabbro – I posted some jsconf videos a while back and really enjoyed Angelina’s talk. Today via twitter, thanks to @thoward37 I now know she also likes some Club Mate
Twitter: https://twitter.com/angelinamagnum
Site: http://realityhacking.net/

So anyway, like I was saying, no promises here. @thoward and I @adron will be kicking off the call for proposals real soon. So as always, keep reading, subscribe, and I’ll have more news soon.