Category: Workshops | Courses | Training

In Flight to Apache Cassandra Days

Another flight down to the bay area. Today it was Alaska Air Flight 330 from Seattle to San Jose. It was mostly a clear day at start, with a solid layer of bright cloud cover exiting Washington on the way down to Oregon. As we crossed over that arbitrary human defined line of Oregon and California, nature presented us with even more perfectly glowing bright cloud cover. This is Cascadia after all and it’s basically covered in clouds the majority of the time. On departure I also noted Bremerton has three aircraft carriers in dock along with a normal plethora of other naval vessels. The amount of naval power in the area is always pretty awe inspiring.

Why was I in flight once again? I am heading down to teach with Jeff Carpenter (@jscarp) at the South Bay Cassandra User Group‘s Cassandra Day events. These are single day events, where we cover an introduction to Apache Cassandra, concepts of data-modeling for Apache Cassandra, and then a wrap up of application development with the respective drivers. Now if you aren’t in Santa Clara – or ya know Menlo Park, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, or well, the surrounding area – there are other days scheduled! We also have days scheduled that aren’t even located in the Bay, so check out the full list of events:

https://www.datastax.com/company/events

NOTE: If you’re interested in Seattle, Portland, or Vancouver BC area events, scroll all the way down to the end of this blog entry I’ve got more details for you!

Introduction to Apache Cassandra

In the introduction to Apache Cassandra we cover an overview of the architecture and features of the distributed database. Starting off with a definition of a distributed hash ring and how this is used in Apache Cassandra to provide data storage across the nodes that make up the Apache Cassandra Database. Moving on we’ll get into the other capabilities, trade offs of data replication between nodes, configuration settings, and a lot more.

Data Modeling

For data modeling we start off with a short review of relational database data modeling to provide something that is more familiar for many people. From this, we then build off of many concepts around denormalization, breaking apart various levels of normalization forms, and then get into the thinking and approach behind modeling an application in a distributed database and go deeper with details around Apache Cassandra.

Application Development

For application development, focusing around the Java language and technology stack, we’ll start with some concepts around how the drivers connect to and work with Apache Cassandra. We’ll open up some code too, get into some code changes and additions, to get more familiar with how the driver works and some of the capabilities of the driver itself.

Most of the code, concepts, and related material in use around Java and the tech stack are directly usable on C#, JavaScript, and even using the community open source Go CQL Library.

Coming soon…

In the coming weeks (ok, maybe a month or two) we’ll be updating this material for Apache Cassandra v4 and additionally, I’m aiming to line up some half day and probably some full day workshops in the Cascadian region: Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver BC. They’ll be almost identical except for a few tweaks, but you’ll have to RSVP to find out the details!

Also, if you’re in between any of those cities and have a stop on the Amtrak Cascades, let me know and we’ll get an RSVP list started for your city and see if we can get the required attendee count to make it official!

Update 2 – Speaking at Node Summit and Node.js Club SF

I’ll be puddle jumping down to San Francisco on the 9th to teach a workshop at Node Summit titled “Node Continuous Integration to Delivery” and then I’ll swing into the Node.js Club SF to give a short (45 minute) deep dive into who, what, where, when, and why of “Node Continuous Integration and Delivery”.

Here’s a short description of the workshop, “In this workshop I’ll show the steps to get from minimal project, to fully deployed web site with a fully integrated and operative continuous integration and delivery pipeline. I’ll also dive into some basic practices around test or behavior driven development within JavaScript to build a full server to client website and have that website deployed, tested – on both client and server, and deployed auto-magically to a live site. During this workshop I’ll break this out into segments, so that over the course of the workshop there will be time to stop, ask questions, and then move to the next stage of the project.”

As I get more specific details about this, I’ll add them to this post. But currently check out Node Summit and Node.js Club SF for more information.

UPDATED January 21, 2015 @ 4:16pm

I’m now listed on the speakers section of the Node Summit Conference Site. The workshop I’ll be providing will be on Monday the 9th, the day before the actual conference from. My workshop will be 3-5pm, in the Fisher East Banquet Room in the event location at:  Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens St, San Francisco, CA 94158

If you’d like to sign up for Node Summit and get 25% off of the registration fee, then follow this link to register for the conference!

Xamarin and I Are Hella Busy Hacking This Week

This week, along with the normal duties of getting everything from SSL working to code slung for account management to intellectual property (what is that exactly 😮 )…  this week is going to get hella busy. Here’s a few of the public events and training that I’ll be attending this week along with the normal bike n’ hacking n’ gettin’ shit done.

Shared Code Projects, PCL and Xamarin on 7/8/14 @

Intel JFCC Auditorium
2111 N.E. 25th Ave
Hillsboro, OR

James Montemagno  from Xamarin is coming to learn us the deets on how to create common core code that can run on any or all common platforms. Find out the differences between shared code project, portable class libraries, and simple file linking to share more code on iOS, Android, and Windows. This should be pretty kick ass to help kick OrchestrateExecutive off the ground. There’s a little more info here for the event: http://www.padnug.org/.

Database Stuff that aint RDBMS on 7/10/14 @

I’ll @adron be presenting on database types, what’s available out there outside of the relational and RDBMS world. How to resolve various problems with alternate data solutions for better results, better performance and ways to leap around the hurdles that are sometimes faced with RDBMS use.  More info here: http://www.meetup.com/ssdevelopers/events/176032122/

Xamarin Hands-on-Lab/Hackathon on 7/12/14 @

Montgomery Park

Kelly White @mckhendry has put together a hands-on-lab and hackathon, just a few days later hosting a hand-on-lab working with Xamarin to build apps. I’m going to hit up this event too (then go ride a 100+ kilometer bike ride, anybody up for the ride, ping me?) and sling some code on OrchestrateExecutive. Also a little more info here for the event: http://www.padnug.org/.

There’s more, but these are the top few meets I’ll be attending over the next two weeks. Happy hacking!

Plotting Good Things in Portland :: pdxbridge.js / WTF Databases /

Several people got together yesterday to start planning things for 2014 in PDX. It ranged from coding workshops to PDX Node to Node PDX to what kind of food to eat at for lunch. Ya know, daily tactical things that come along with the big picture items. 😉

bridge.js badge.
bridge.js badge.

Two things that I want to bring up to the community out there. One is a workshop that I’ll likely lead efforts to organize and the other is something I’ll just call pdxbridge.js for now. The workshop will cover the topics of which and what databases to use for what data and how to implement. The pdxbridge.js project is about determining the raised or lowered state of the bridges here in Portland.

Some of the other projects, workshops and other topics we discussed included getting a workshop put together around unit, integration and testing code from a behavioral, test driven development or other approaches. This workshop we don’t have anyone to teach, but we’d (ok, so I really really would love to attend a workshop on this) really like to find somebody who would be willing to teach a workshop of this sort, with a focus on Javascript as the language. On that same topic however, if you’re into Java, Erlang, Scala, Haskell or others and would like to teach a TDD, BDD or related testing workshop please get in touch with me. We will work on making that happen! Ping me at adron at composite code dot com. 😉

Workshop: Intro to Databases & Data

(Relational, Key/Value, Distributed, Graph, Event Series, etc.)

This is a course I’ll lead and others will work with me on to put something extra useful together. We will then teach the workshop as a group, kind of a team paired programming teaching workshop. If there is anything in particular that you’d like to learn about, any questions that you have about data and usage in applications or otherwise add your two cents on this blog entries comments. Over the next month we’ll be putting together the material and have the course available sometime early this year. So if you’d like to attend, jump in at any time with the conversation or just keep a read here and I’ll have more information about the course as we get it put together.

Let’s Make pdxbridge.js Happen!

The pdxbridge.js project is all about determining if a bridge in Portland is up or down. Right now there are  several bridges that matter, that are on this list;

If we add other information to track about the bridges we might add the other 3 that exist and the new bridge that is being built. however the five listed are the only bridges that have a raised and lowered state, and in one case the Steel Bridge has a lowered, partially raised and fully raised state. As shown on the pdxbridge.js badge I threw together (shown above).

To get involved with pdxbridge.js go add your input on this issue I started to discuss our first meet, plan and hack.

Becoming a Better Programmer… Step One, Build a Course

Often a programmer sits back and reflects on, “how can I get better at my job?” A number of months ago I found myself sitting with that same reflection. One of the many ideas that popped into my head was to put together focused material around a topic. Training material, a blog series or something else. I wasn’t sure just yet what it would be, but I knew that was one of the many things I wanted to do. Fast forward a few months.

Fellow Tier 3 coder Richard Seroter, who I’d known for some time via his blog “Richard Seroter’s Architecture Musings” and I had a conversation about what we do, respectively, to keep our skills honed in tech. He brought up he’d be putting together material for Pluralsight for a while now and enjoyed that. It struck me as something I’d like to do too, considering my past reflection, so he made an intro. The rest is history!

Pluralsight Author, Achievement Reached

I’m now a Pluralsight Author (my author’s page) with my first course on Riak Fundamentals. I’m now working on a second course, on Docker Fundamentals. I’ve got a lot more in the queue after that too, so I hope to keep producing a lot of material on everything from the big languages these days like Javascript, Java, Ruby and C# to lesser knowns like Erlang, Go and maybe some others to boot.

For now, check out my Riak Fundamentals Course and some of the other great material that Pluralsight has available. They’ve just acquired TekPub, Peepcode and a number of other companies too, so when you subscribe you don’t just get all the Pluralsight material but also access to all the material at these excellent course creating companies! In the coming days and weeks I’ll have some reviews of other courses I enjoyed. As always, enjoy, subscribe to my blog, subscribe to Pluralsight and cheers!

References: