Wow, so this week has been an intense return to Portland for me. I got back earlier in the week and hit the ground doing a bit of catch up after being on the rails for two weeks to Denver, over to San Francisco and then back up here to Portland. The whole time cramming my brain full of Erlang, getting ramped up on efforts to help bring Riak to everybody that it can help, expand the open source community and do what I do. Expand the community and the risk taking, code inventing, hacker of hardware, and curious ideas that we all have as best I can.
Turning from looking back and looking forward, getting into a proactive view of events coming up there are a couple things I want to let everybody know about. They’re all intertwined here in the Portland Tech Community and well beyond, with events in Seattle and Vancouver BC coming up sooner than later!
Basho Coworking Office Hours
The Riak Products; Riak, RiakCS and Riak EnterpriseDS
These events are every two weeks, starting this Monday. The meet is at NedSpace, we’ll grab the excellent Butcher’s Block Table and converse, code together, implement or deploy Riak and generally answer, present or find the information you need. Feel free to come in and join at anytime during 9am-11am on Monday the 4th, and every two weeks hereafter. You can RSVP here (meetup.com) or here *(eventbrite). For those that are RSVPed and show we’ll have various swag. Prospectively after building some momentum we’ll start bringing in some premium coffee or other beverages to help kick off your day.
Write The Docs
Write The Docs
This is a new conference here in Portland that is being put together around documentation, document driven development and topics surrounding this oft overlooked and extremely important aspect of software development. As one would expect, it has a github repo.
Currently there are some speakers, but the call for proposals is still open, so check it out and if you’re interested in speaking jump in there and add to the conference and growing conversation! Here’s a short description from the conference site about what Write The Docs is about,
“Write the Docs is a two-day conference focused on documentation systems, tech writing theory, and information delivery. It will be held on April 8-9 in Portland, Oregon.
Writing and maintaining documentation involves the talents of a multidisciplinary community of technical writers, designers, typesetters, developers, support teams, marketers, and many others.
This conference creates a time and a place for this community of documentarians to share information, discuss ideas, and work together to improve the art and science of documentation.
We invite all those who write the docs to spread the word:
Docs or it didn’t happen!”
Speakers so far… there are more coming!
Nóirín Plunkett Plunkett AKA @noirinp the Curator of People
From the recent speaker announcement, “Nóirín Plunkett is a jack of all trades, and a master of several. By day, she works for Eucalyptus Systems, as a geek<->English translator, and general force multiplier. She’s passionate about community, communication, and collaboration. Nóirín got her open source start at Apache, helping out with the httpd documentation project.”
From the recent speaker announcement, “Kenneth Reitz is the product owner of Python at Heroku and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He embraces minimalism, elegant architecture, and simple interfaces. Kenneth is well known for his many open source projects, specifically Requests. His projects are always well documented, and he is the curator of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, which documents best practices for Python developers.”
From the recent speaker announcement, “Jim R. Wilson started hacking at the age of 13 and never looked back. He has contributed to open source projects such as MediaWiki and HBase, and managed the large-scale documentation system at Vistaprint. He’s co-author of one NoSQL book, and currently writing a node.js book.”
The perpetrators of this conference are the reknown Troy Howard @thoward37, Eric Redmond @coderoshi and a fellow tech cohort I’ve recently met at The Side Door Eric Holscher @ericholscher.
Node PDX
There’s an announcement coming real soon about this!
Hope you have a little patience, this blog entry is going to be pretty long. There was a multitude of conferences, more than a hundred pair coding sessions, more cities, hotels and other things as I criss crossed the country helping to knock out projects, code, fire off some open source projects and generally get some technology implemented. It has been a spectacular year. I also could add, it has thoroughly kicked my ass and I’ve loved it.
2012 Coding Projects
In 2012 I’ve taken the healm of the Iron Foundry Project which led to the creation of Tier 3 Web Fabric PaaS. A Cloud Foundry & Iron Foundry .NET based PaaS. From there the project led to an expansion of leading the efforts on the Thor Project, which is a Cloud Foundry User Interface for OS-X and Windows 7. Beyond that I’ve contributed to and participated in dozens of different projects in various ways over the year. I finished up this year by joining Basho in December and thus, joined the Riak & related Basho Projects.
Some of the projects I’ve started, will join or hope to otherwise continue participation in include the following. Here’s to hoping 2013 is a hard core coding and contributing year of excellence!
Many of the Basho Organization’s Projects I’ll be diving into, including work around Rebar, Riak, Docs & a number of others.
Name Factory – a project I’ve started a while back of Riak + JavaScript around creating massive test data with JavaScript and also using Riak for the storage & searching on that data created.
Criollo – Criollo is one of the most common forms of cocoa, is a native OS-X Cocoa User Interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
SpikeOp – This I’ve dubbed the name of the iOS interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
I want to use and possibly contribute to Corrugated Iron, the .NET Client for Riak. Prospectively to use for a Windows 8 User Interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
Expand on prospective services for Cloud Foundry, either I or efforts I may lead to do this.
…there are others, but they’ll have to be figured out during the course of events. Also, there are an easy dozen other projects I’ll be working that don’t particularly have to do with coding, two are listed below. For an easy way to keep up with the projects I’m coding on, leading, participating in or otherwise hit me up on Twitter @adron or ADN @adron.
Big Project Aims for 2013
Thrashing Code Project – This is sort of, kind of secret. It’s going to happen soon, I have a personal schedule for it and I’ll be releasing information accordingly when the site and twitter account goes live.
Tour Triumvirate – I intend to plan, and hopefully will take at least 2 of the three tech tours I setup. More information will be forthcoming, but the original notion is outlined in the blog entry I wrote titled “The Adron Code Tour, Let’s Hack, Bike and Talk Hard Core Technology“.
Books I’ve Read in 2012
All of these I’ve either read or re-read in 2012. I set a goal at the beginning of last year to get my ass in gear when it comes to reading. A focused, get it read, understood and learn approach. I think I did pretty good overall. Not a book a week, but I’m getting back in gear. Considering my best year of reading was 100+ books, it might be a difficult to reach that again since I’m a working citizen, versus a child with plenty of time on their hands. But, it’s good to have goals. 😉
The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
The Rails 3 Way
Eloquent Ruby
The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You, Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat
The Myth of the Robber Barons
Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT
Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
Rework
Steve Jobs
Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Node for Front-End Developers
First Contact (In Her Name: The Last War, #1)
Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing
The REST API Design Handbook
HTML5 Canvas
HTML5: Up and Running
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Traffic
Book Reading Aims for 2013
Natural Capitalism
How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
Political Ideals
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
Bikenomics: An Introduction to the Bicycle Economy
Everyday Bicycling: How to Ride a Bike for Transportation (Whatever Your Lifestyle)
Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
Erlang Programming
Building Web Applications with Erlang: Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws
Think Complexity: Complexity Science and Computational Modeling
Async JavaScript
Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere (Smashing Magazine Book Series)
Windows PowerShell for Developers
How to Use the Unix-Linux vi Text Editor
Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook
Designing Interfaces
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
Consider Phlebas
Snow Crash
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise
Simply Complexity
Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
Thinking In Systems: A Primer
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Programming in Objective-C
Learning iPad Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building iPad Apps with iOS 5
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
Getting Started with GEO, CouchDB, and Node.js
JavaScript Web Applications
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
Design Patterns in Ruby
…and the two books I’d like to re-read this year because they’re just absurdly entertaining and I’d like a refresher of the stories.
A Confederacy of Dunces (I’ll be reading this for the 2nd time)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Yup, just want to read it again)
My 2012 Coder’s Year in Photos
What I’ve put together here is a photo story of the year, hopefully it’s entertaining in some way. With that, here’s a review of the year, cheers and happy new year! 2012 started with one of my last hack sessions as a Seattle Resident at Ruby at Racer weekly meetup.
Ruby at Racer Meetup
Meanwhile some of my last views from Russell Investments. Absolutely beautiful, epic and awe inspiring views of the Puget Sound from the Emerald City of Seattle.
View from Russell Investments Seattle Headquarters, stunning!
Then a fitting image, from the business meeting floor of the same building, the settings sun for my departure.
Overlooking the Puget Sound, Japanese Garden in the forefront from the Russell Investments Building in Seattle.
February of 2012 kicked of with my return to Portland, Oregon. Stumptown regularly welcomed me back more than a few moments.
Stumptown Morning Brew
One of the first meetups I attended back in Portland was the DevOps Meetup.
DevOps DevOpers Hanging around pre-meeting at PuppetLabs in Portland.
That DevOps meetup just happened to have a session on one of the code bases I was working with, Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Foundry preso on how the pull requests and such where going to be built into a process, which still today is rather cumbersome for community involvement. However, it’s still moving forward, albeit at a slower pace than it could if it was streamlined around github instead of github being an “end point” read only repository…
While my move consisted of many a couch, as I just couch surfed for the first 45 or so days I was back in Portland, I finally moved into a place at the Indigo in downtown.
My New Place, priorities as they are my system sits in the corner ready for use.
The new system, albeit a great Christmas present from 2011, became the defacto work system of 2012 and remains one of my top machines. Mac Book Air w/ 4GB RAM, i5 Proc, 256 GB SSD. Not a bad machine.
2011 Mac Book Air, settled into it’s workspace cradle.
A view from on high, looking down upon the streets of San Francisco from the New Relic Offices. Thanks for the invite and the visit, it was great meeting the great team at New Relic San Francisco!
New Relic San Francisco View
Getting around on my first trip to San Francisco of 2012. Thanks to John, Bjorn, Bill, John and the whole team in Portland and San Francisco for the invite. Great talking to you guys.
MUNI Streetcar FTW!
On the same trip it began pouring rain as I’d never seen before in San Francisco. I sat by Duboche Park, staying warm and away from drowning! Arriving outside was one of the MUNIs that eventually I was rescued by from the torrential floods and returned to downtown, dry and intact!
MUNI to the rescue on the torrential downpour of the year in San Francisco.
…and Julia thanks for the tour around San Francisco and the extra tasty lunch at EAT!! Good times!
Eating at the EAT sign!
Amidst all these images, I threw together some into a collage. There are a number of awesome coders & hackers of all sorts in these images. Shout out to Jerry Sievert, Eric Sterling,
Snikies, a collage I made!!!! (This one you can click on for a full size image)
…and alas I’ll have another zillion images and such as we all roll into 2013 and onward. Cheers! For some more new years posts I’ve found useful check out this list, which I’ll be adding to over the next few days.
That title sounds like a Dream Theater song or something. But alas, I’m going to try and answer the question for the next few weeks per my calendar of logistics.
September 10th (Monday) – September 14th (Friday) I’ll be in Seattle for networking, work and a few rounds. Maybe a geek lunch or two too, who’s up for it?
September 22nd (Saturday) I’ll be at the Portland Streetcar eastside Loop Party. Yeah yeah, it doesn’t really have anything to do with tech, but I’m a transit nerd, so gotta go see the new streetcar line.
October 8th (Monday) – October 17th (Wednesday) I’ll be in San Francisco for the RICON (A Distributed System Conference for Developers) and the HTML 5 Dev Conf (js, html5 and all that developer conference).
Thor & Cloud Foundry Hackathon & Installfest
Curious if anyone is up for meeting and doing an installfest or hacking on Cloud Foundry, Iron Foundry or checking out Thor this coming week in Seattle? Any takers? Leave a comment and I’ll also ping the people of the Twitterverse and App.net. I’m up for meeting at a coffee shop or other space and would be happy to come to an office or other environment if anyone is interested.
Are you digging that ASP.NET MVC Framework or waiting for the next ALT.NET meetup?
Loving that ease of Ruby on Rails to wow your user base with ease, to implement with Sinatra those clean JavaScript & jQuery enabled UX for your clients?
Want to talk shop, eat some grub, have a beverage, and get a nerd kick start in the morning?
In that case meet us for Urban Lean Agile Tech Breakfast Meetup at Mod Pizza @ 1302 6th Avenue @ 8 am on Wednesday, August 3rd.
Nóirín Plunkett Plunkett AKA @noirinp the Curator of People 
Kenneth Reitz AKA @kennethreitz the Wandering street photographer and moral fallibilist & Pythoner
Jim R. Wilson AKA @helixb the jimbojw and helixb and…
Are you hard core into technology and software development like Node.js, JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, .NET, Java, Clojure and more?
Do you like the ideas behind the 
Loving that ease of Ruby on Rails to wow your user base with ease, to implement with Sinatra those clean JavaScript & jQuery enabled UX for your clients?
In that case meet us for Urban Lean Agile Tech Breakfast Meetup at Mod Pizza @ 1302 6th Avenue @ 8 am on Wednesday, August 3rd.
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