Just some quick awesome things that were shown at OS Bridge today during some of the sessions. I went and checked out @aaronpk‘s Session on automation. Here’s some of the videos he has put together of his work he’s done (I did notice that there’s some @caseorganic rocking the geo games too though).
Microsoft announced today that they’ll be supporting an effort to get Node.js working on Windows. Mary Foley picked it up quick, but also so did Node creator Ryan Dhal. This, being the explosion of support for Node.js, is excellent news. This further enables JavaScript for the whole stack, on any operating system stack. Getting a good solid, stable, and supported version on Windows will enable some serious performance on that platform. Up until the release of the support, Node.js is primarily limited to Windows via software called CYGWIN, which emulates (or runs on?) Windows and simulates a Unix/Linux Environment.
I’ll have more information regarding Node.js, Node Package Manager, and the whole suite of packages to get started with Node Development over the next couple of days. So stay tuned if you’re interested in getting started!
First a quick catch up on the afternoon and evening activities from day #1.
Linuxcon in Vancouver, British Columbia!
I discovered that Linuxcon will be in Vancouver this year. Linus will be coming to keynote with another 10 keynote sessions following that. To top all that off, it will be the 20th anniversary for Linux! For more information check out the following:
While talking with people I stumbled upon an interesting interview and write up by Rick Turosczy with Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams. In the interview he discuss Portland from the perspective of the city being a startup. Great write up and interview, check it out.
After the events of the day I headed to Bailey’t to meet up with some other coders where I got a short crash course on a couple of awesome technologies. One technology I had been meaning to download and install. It was cool to get a quick review of Node.js.
If you’re doing any sort of web development or software development in general, you need to go and try out Node.js and see what it is about. To see the power of node, just start by taking a look how you execute it. The following line starts the server (after installing it of course).
% node example.js
Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/
Then writing a server hello world application is as simple as this:
varhttp=require('http');http.createServer(function (req,res){res.writeHead(200,{'Content-Type':'text/plain'});res.end('Hello World\n');}).listen(1337,"127.0.0.1");console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/’);
That’s it, and you’re up and running. For more information check out the Node.js Site.
After the quick study on node from @jerrysievert (thanks Jerry!), he jumped right into NPM and got me up to speed with Node Package Manager. Along with the node manager we also reviewed Ffffallback and other Javascript dev tools and frameworks.
Now, For Day #2
So now, after all that from yesterday let’s get to today. Today kicked off a little later than day #1, for various undisclosed reasons. 🙂
The first session of today was for Jellyfish Javascript Execution Engine. By Adam Christian & his cohort from Yammer. This session also had a HUGE DOSE of WRITE CODE FOR YOUR APPS OR YOU’LL PAY THE PRICE OF BAD CODE added to it. Which for me, was a bit of choir preaching. 😉 I’m all about the tests and can’t imagine code bases without tests. (I suppose I could, but I’d have nightmares).
The Jellyfish Effort is a Node Project working toward getting your JavaScript to run everywhere. For even more detailed information about the project check out the Jellyfish Github Site.
Some of the other things to check out if you’re interested in Jellyfish and browser testing:
Day #1 has kicked off with a bang. A keynote that really pulled at the heart strings for the love of freedom and liberty! The notion of technology being involved directly to those pushing for their freedom. Below I’ve snagged a part of the description:
Description
A first-hand talk about the politics, technology and ethics of hacktivism. I’ll give an overview of some of the active groups, including Anonymous and Telecomix and discuss some of the projects I’ve worked on in the past few months. See this blog post and video of lightning talk from Pycon.
supporting communications in the Middle East: working 20 hours / day for a week for Egypt without dying
When the Net is up: proxies, mirrors, VPNs, encryption, retweeting
When the Net is down: dialup modem pools, fax blasts, ham radio
Works in Progress: two-way radio HOWTOs, Intranet LiveCDs
This keynote really made me realize I’ve gotten disconnected from a lot of things that pulled me into technology. The connected aspirations of people to change the world for the better is massive. The efforts that are going on around the world were described well by Peter Fein. Putting emphasis on the importance of having cell phones that can take video and get the word out when a regime is getting out of control. Having this immediate communication to call out the evil in the world has grown exponentially.
Gavin spoke about how to design an architecture, primarily using Amazon Web Services, to build for scalability and uptime. Some of the main take home points I tweeted:
The ongoing problem with the cloud is high volume/throughput/iops w/ storage. < Is there a pending solution? #osb11#aws
#osb11 Only get ~10G of true local storage? <- me: why are you depending heavily on this? Use S3, SimpleDB, or other?
to which I received a follow up…
@adronbh interested in the answer to that, if anyone dares
@adronbh yes, would agree on #EMC#Isilon, still kind of hard and expensive;-)
…to which I ponder also, who is working on a legitimate price conscious, reasonable, high volume and high throughput storage medium that can be utilized via cloud computing?
I’m headed down to Portland, Oregon today for OS Bridge. OS Bridge is a conference for the open source community, by the community. The conference is one of the premier events to learn how open source really works, learn from others, and meet people that are also learning about and involved in the open source community.
The OS Bridge Conference, like almost all of the conferences that I attend these days, is all volunteers. There are no major sponsors shoving some message or product down your throat. There is no overhanging air of elitism (even though I’ll admit, for newcomers it is sometimes intimidating, but don’t worry we don’t bite ;)). It is simply about the community and about the software that individuals of the open source community work together to create.
The tracks are organized in an interesting way for OS Bridge. The OS BridgeTracks are split in a way to encourage cross-pollination and in depth discussion. The tracks as I know them are:
Business – This focus will be around open source as a business, how to work with and interact with open source entities, pick licensing models, and other related facets.
Chemistry – The chemistry of open source revolves around setting up environments, infrastructure, and assuring the systems we build are working the way we expect. This track embodies getting your fingers dirty with a good hands on chemistry set. 🙂
Cooking – Recipes are essential to cooking. Keeping well organized recipes for system administration, software development and deployment, and other courses is key to a good meal of software development.
Culture – Within the open source community are individuals of many alignments, but one thing that really connects people in the community is the culture of learning, building, and working together to create things that are greater than their individual parts.
Over the years I’ve written a ton of software. As anyone in this industry might relate with, some has been thrown away and some is used currently. I’ve saved companies thousands, hundreds, even millions of dollars. I’ve been saddened by some software I’ve built and euphoric with other projects of software I’ve built. The things I have been consistently throughout my career is that I love to learn and am proud of what I do.
Over the last few years, because I like to learn and am proud of what I do. I have wanted to improve my development practices. The more I work toward improving and using new and better ways to do development I keep working with the open source community. There are a number of reasons;
The open source community is focused on learning and creating.
Open source software does not close or hide information, knowledge, or actual software.
The community is often the first to try something, often first to market, and is almost always pushing new ways to develop things.
Open source software bridges all technology stacks, even the once resistant Microsoft Stack has active and ongoing contributions to open source software now.
There is also one other fact that really pulls everything together. Just as we breath air, software developers share ideas and information. Regardless of legal obfuscations or otherwise all software developers, in some way, are involved with learning and furthering our trade. In the end, to do that, we work with each other and freely share information all the time.
That’s just a few reasons why I’m going, I could go on. Over the next few days I hope to put a few more blog entries about my experiences. I hope my insights are useful, Enjoy!
Microsoft announced today that they’ll be supporting an effort to get Node.js working on Windows. 
The ongoing problem with the cloud is high volume/throughput/iops w/ storage. < Is there a pending solution? 
Stay tuned for 