Tag: conferences

JSConf EU

In light of the upcoming Cascadia.js Conf I was digging around last night through some of the other JavaScript Conference videos and found the JSConf EU’s listings on Youtube. Here’s a few picks from the ones I watched. I’d highly advise checking these out, there’s a lot of great content there. With that quick introduction, here’s Max, Irene and James. Cheers!

Max Ogden @MaxOgden provides reasons how to help Government work better through various means…  absolutely great talk. Check it out.

Irene Ros @ireneros combining practices we’ve had for years into a better way to get data.

James Halliday (@substack and github) UNIX Philosophy and…  just watch this, James is kick ass and contributes a ton to the #nodejs community.

Coder’s Vacation : Preparation “RICON 2012, HTML 5 Developers Conference and Loading Up”

This next week I’m off to San Francisco for a coder’s vacation. I don’t exactly know what a coder’s vacation is but that’s what I’m aiming to define! I’ll put together a description of my idea of a coder’s vacation below. There are going to be several components about this vacation that really make it a coder’s vacation, such as:

  1. My trip is to San Francisco – This makes it an ideal place to be, as a coder, to hone one’s skills and meet the top people in startups, software and other areas. There is literally coding happening all over the city. Plus it is a fairly nice city to frequent to begin with.
  2. I’m Traveling via the Coast Starlight – This will give me significant time to study up on some of the things I’m learning right now. A little node.js, javascript, go and maybe even some other things while I relax in luxury and enjoy first class accommodations in the sleeper. I’ll also be blogging a bit about this and what it is like to disconnect for a while when you’re in transit between two points. There is some serious time to get out of the rat race and figure out we’re your headed personally, with technology, coding and more (and yes, that is one of my pictures of the Coast Starlight from a few years ago, it is a beast of a train at 15 cars!).
  3. I’ll be attending RICON 2012 – If you’re going to be there, let me know. We should meetup during the conference. Maybe pair up on some code, discuss data architectures, dilemmas and related things or just grab a drink. Since the trip is coinciding with the conference, there was no way I wasn’t going to go hang out with the Basho Crew and their inaugeral conference on #phatdata (see twitter for more context).
  4. I’ll be speaking at HTML 5 Developer’s Conference – This isn’t during the “vacation” part of the trip, but it is in San Francisco.
  5. Pairing up, conversations & coding with others – Because San Francisco is one of the best places in the world for this. I’ll be meeting up with some other coders and working on some ideas around #phatdata, architecture with various frameworks and solutions like Node.js, JavaScript and prospectively some others.
  6. I’ll be tweeting, documenting, blogging, video recording and photographing – Nuff’ said.  🙂

Definition:

Coder’s Vacation – [kohd]-er’s [vey-key–shuhn, vuh-] – A form of vacation, except that the individual taking the vacation is a coder and participates in coder activities. Such as hackathons, pair coding, maker development, physical computing, learning or reading about new software development technologies or otherwise spends their time on the vacation.

Phat Data (see also #phatdata) – [fat] [dey-tuh, dat-uh, dah-tuh] – I’ve replaced the use of the big data term with that of phat data. It just seems more fun, just as poor a characterization of the topic, so why not. If you can define big data then you can define phat data! So basically, help me define this, I’ll be tweeting about it a lot at RICON 2012.

For more definitions of things I often use in phrases on the blog, check out my dictionary. With this laid out, let the coder vacation begin.

Cheers!

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?

So 2012 is Coming Up, It’s the End of The World, and There Are Lots of Conferences!

On that note, here are a few of the conferences I’d like to attend. I expect I’ll be able to make it to about 70% of them. If you’re going to any of these, message me on Twitter @Adron (or leave a comment below) and we’ll have a coffee, beer, or beverage of your choice and chit chat about cloud computing, utility or grid bits, software development, node.js, testing, or what have you.  Cheers!

UX Related Conferences

Even though UX is by no means my specialty or something I generally am hired to work on, I personally consider UX to be one of the most important aspects of software development that exists. UX is the difference between “insanely great” applications and “shit” (I’m quoting Steve Jobs here, so excuse the harsh language, but it is true). With this serious focus on UX I find it extremely helpful to attend UX related conferences, talk to UI/UX pros, and generally be involved as often as possible in effective and great ways to build experiences for users around systems.

  • SXSW in Austin, Texas: I’d love to attend this conference, it is however unlikely. Matter of fact, it is probably one of the only conferences I’d travel to Texas for. One of these days, I hope to attend.
  • IA Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana: There are two primary reasons this event is on my list. 1, it’s in New Orleans and I always love to go visit my haunts from when I lived in the area and 2, the content looks pretty good & some solid people are attending.  Conversations and after conference events should be extremely enlightening.
  • An Event Apart in Seattle, Washington: Again, a great conference series and it’s also in a great location. Seattle (which I happen to live here right now too) is a great place for conferences, a great place to think, and a great place for a convergence of user experience thought leaders.
  • UX Week in San Francisco, California: San Francisco is another awesome city for these types of events (not distracting and annoying like Las Vegas). There will be some great collaboration and networking with great content. I’ll be putting forth an effort to attend this event.
  • WebVisions in Portland, Oregon:  It’s in Portland, Oregon. Nuff said. Well ok, I’ll add a little more. WebVisions often has some of the best content around. I’ve never attended one of the conferences officially but have interacted with and been in town when the conference takes place in Portland. The beauty of Portland is that the events easily spill over into the most walkable, drink friendly, foodie heaven, easy to talk in environment, and one of the most technologically advanced and versed populations in the United States – thus providing WebVisions a GREAT reputation in my opinion.
  • Siggraph in Los Angeles, California: This event really opens the mind up to some amazing new interactive experiences with technology.

Dev Related Conferences

Ok. I’m a software developer, no real need to define why I’m going to these.  😉

  • Agile Open Northwest in Seattle, Washington: This is a great open spaces conference about agile ideals, practices, and approaches. It’s a great conference to get together with advocates and practitioners of agile/lean/XP or whatever and discuss what works, doesn’t, and what might work. Stepping into the future of being a better, faster, higher quality, happier and more bad ass team!
  • WhereConference in San Francisco, California:  This event has multiple wins.
    • It’s in San Francisco, which is generally always cool.
    • It’s an O’Reilly Conference, which are generally always awesome.
    • Mobile + Geographic Location Finding is one of the most interesting and coolest realms of technology these days.
    • There are some spectacularly cool people attending that I’d love to spend some face to face time with and discuss where they’re headed, where they see location going, and generally have a drink or three and having a great time.
  • OSCON in Portland, Oregon: This event is one of the, if not the best Open Source Software Conference in existence!  Again, anything in Portland makes it pretty easy to attend, and the environment in that city just adds all that much more to the conference!

Cloud / Utility / Big Data Computing Conferences

I’m a big advocate of geographically dispersed, grid compute, utility computing, platform infrastructure or software as a service, on autoscaling, scalable, and big data wielding, high query hadooping systems, AKA Cloud Computing. I see it as the future of high quality, fast paced, massively scaled, intelligent systems and development of these systems. Maybe I’ve drank the kool-aid, either way I’m hedging my bets with the cloud computing realm and not on legacy & traditional hosting and methods associated with that. Thus, I’m going to as many of these conferences too!

  • Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, California: I’ve no idea how this conference is, nor if it will be good, but I’m signed up already. Anyone I know going? Anyone I don’t know but should? Ping me.
  • Strata in Santa Clara, California: Again, never been to Santa Clara nor a conference here. I’ve heard good things about Strata so am working to attend. There is some really good content and more than a few people I’d like to catch up with.