Today the first Nodebots Day took place worldwide! Portland held its own event here at the old Urban Airship garage space. With the garage door wide open and the glorious day gleaming daylight into the garage 50+ hardware and coding beginners, learners, coders and hackers of all backgrounds came together. Breadboards were wired up, code was slung, robots moved and twitched to life.
This all started with a super quick organizing effort by some local JavaScript hackers to join the worldwide Nodebots Day (check the repo for infoz). After a meet, some sponsors jumping to our aid, and some hustle by some great people, the event in Portland came together. The turnout was great!
The bits everybody got…Bits up close…
My Own Robot Battle
Oh dear, I was dead zonked when I arrived. It’s been a super long and hard week. I’ve had deadlines to meet, code to write and OSCON to attend, needless to say that leaves basically a few hours each night of the last week to actually recharge. Things were definitely catching up with me… and I’ll admit I made almost zero progress, however I was super excited to see what many others accomplished!
There was the quad copter that Carter @CarterRabasa got up and flying with some aerobatic acrobatic flips.
There was an erector set wheeled robot that was primed for deployment. Nothing like combining the quality and build endurance of erector set gear with that of modern machine and robot automation for fun!
Troy going mad scientist on his bot.
Troy @thoward37 was building a walking bot for world domination… which if he didn’t finish it after my departure I’m looking forward to see it walking and doing full auto-deploy in the near future.
Serial Port for a head!Wires, Connections, Devices & More…
There was musical linkages being made to device and computer alike. With code combining to form knew methods of interaction between device, human and music.
Along with these bots there was much progress among breadboards laced with ideas and blinking LEDs amidst us all. I do believe everybody had a blast and learned a lot.
Erector RobotWorking together… creating the robot society!Codez! Arduino! Wires! Brains!
Johnny 5 and I say “THANKS AND HIGH FIVES!!!”
A huge thanks to so many, I might have missed a few people, apologies (and let me know, I’ll add you to the list of thanks!!) — and also, thanks to EVERYBODY who came out and worked and learned about robots!
Also if anybody has any questions about robots, javascript, node.js, robots in Portland, Portland Bridges or the event or about coming to Portland to hack, code, beer, food or just move here. Let me know and I’ll be more than happy to hook you up with appropriate resources! Peace!
@HackyGoLucky – Cuz yeah, you kicked some ass and herded all us cats together for this! Thanks Tracy!
@nexxylove – Thanks for the code repo o’ lights! I’m sure you enjoyed San Francisco, we missed you in Portland! We’ll hack when you’re back!
@BlaineBublitz – Welcome to Portland again, thanks for traveling into town! I’ll ping you next I’m in Phoenix and we’ll hack the light rail. 😉
@s5fs – Yo, ok, you just front loaded my cortex full of ideas on that last brunch convo. Thanks for helping, being kick ass, and coming out to Nodebots day!
@nickniemeir – Thanks for coming up to Nodebots day PDX!
@thoward37 – What did you do again? You keep showing up everywhere… are you a robot?
@CarterRabasa – Thanks for coming down to the Stumptown from the Emerald City.
@_jden – Yo, Palo Alto to bridge city (another PDX nick name)… welcome back to PDX and to the future with our Robot Overlords!
The Rails 2013 Conference kicked off for me, with a short bike ride through town to the conference center. The Portland conference center is one of the most connected conference centers I’ve seen; light rail, streetcar, bus, bicycle boulevards, trails & of course pedestrian access is all available. I personally have no idea if you can drive to it, but I hear there is parking & such for drivers.
Streetcars
Rails Conf however clearly places itself in the category of a conference of people that give a shit! This is evident in so many things among the community, from the inclusive nature creating one of the most diverse groups of developers to the fact they handed out 7 day transit passes upon picking up your Rails Conf Pass!
Bikes!
The keynote was by DHH (obviously right?). He laid out where the Rails stack is, some roadmap topics & drew out how much the community had grown. Overall, Rails is now in the state of maintain and grow the ideal. Considering its inclusive nature I hope to see it continue to grow and to increase options out there for people getting into software development.
Railsconf 2013
I also met a number of people while at the conference. One person I ran into again was Travis, who lives out yonder in Jacksonville, Florida and works with Hashrocket. Travis & I, besides the pure metal, have Jacksonville as common stomping ground. Last year I’d met him while the Hash Rocket Crew were in town. We discussed Portland, where to go and how to get there, plus what Hashrocket has been up to in regards to use around Mongo, other databases and how Ruby on Rails was treating them. The conclusion, all good on the dev front!
One of these days though, the Hashrocket crew is just gonna have to move to Portland. Sorry Jacksonville, we’ll visit one day. 😉
For the later half of the conferene I actually dove out and headed down for some client discussions in the country of Southern California. Nathan Aschbacher headed up Basho attendance at the conference from this point on. Which reminds me, I’ve gotta get a sitrep with Nathan…
RICON East (May 13th & 14th)
RICON East
Ok, so I didn’t actually attend RICON East (sad face), I had far too many things to handle over here in Portlandia – but I watched over 1/3rd of the talks via the 1080p live stream. The basic idea of the RICON Conferences, is a conference series focused on distributed systems. Riak is of course a distributed database, falling into that category, but RICON is by no means merely about Riak at all. At RICON the talks range from competing products to acedemic heavy hitting talks about how, where and why distributed systems are the future of computing. They may touch on things you may be familiar with such as;
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
Existing databases and how they may fit into the fabric of distributed systems (such as Postgresql)
How to scale distributed across AWS Cloud Services, Azure or other cloud providers
RICON East
As the videos are posted online I’ll be providing some blog entries around the talks. It will however be extremely difficult to choose the first to review, just as RICON back in October of 2012, every single talk was far above the modicum of the median!
Two immediate two talks that stand out was Christopher Meiklejohn’s @cmeik talk, doing a bit o’ proofs and all, in realtime off the cuff and all. It was merely a 5 minute lightnight talk, but holy shit this guy can roll through and hand off intelligence via a talk so fast in blew my mind!
The other talk was Kyle’s, AKA @aphry, who went through network partitions with databases. Basically destroying any comfort you might have with your database being effective at getting reads in a partition event. Kyle knows his stuff, that is without doubt.
There are many others, so subscribe keep reading and I’ll be posting them in the coming weeks.
Node PDX 2013 (May 16th & 17th)
Horse_js and other characters, planning some JavaScript hacking!
Holy moley we did it, again! Thanks to EVERYBODY out there in the community for helping us pull together another kick ass Node PDX event! That’s two years in a row now! My fellow cohort of Troy Howard @thoward37 and Luc Perkins @lucperkins had hustled like some crazed worker bees to get everything together and ready – as always a lot always comes together the last minute and we don’t get a wink of sleep until its all done and everybody has had a good time!
Node PDX Sticker Selection was WICKED COOL!
Node PDX, it’s pretty self descriptive. It’s a one Node.js conference that also includes topics on hardware, javascript on the client side and a host of other topics. It’s also Portland specific. We have Portland Local Roasted Coffee (thanks Ristretto for the pour over & Coava for the custom roast!), Portland Beer (thanks brew capital of the world!), Portland Food (thanks Nicolas’!), Portland DJs (thanks Monika Mhz!), Portland Bands and tons of Portland wierdness all over the place. It’s always a good time! We get the notion at Node PDX, with all the Portlandia spread all over it’s one of the reasons that 8-12 people move to and get hired in Portland after this conference every year (it might become a larger range, as there are a few people planning to make the move in the coming months!).
A wide angle view of Holocene where Node PDX magic happened!
The talks this year increased in number, but maintained a solid range of topics. We had a node.js disco talk, client side JavaScript, sensors and node.js, and even heard about people’s personal stories of how they got into programming JavaScript. Excellent talks, and as with RICON, I’ll be posting a blog entry and adding a few penny thoughts of my own to each talk.
Tea & Chris kick off Polyglot Conference 2013!A smiling crowd!
Polyglot Conference was held in Vancouver again this year, with clear intent to expand to Portland and Seattle in the coming year or two. I’m super stoked about this and will definitely be looking to help out – if you’re interested in helping let me know and I’ll get you in contact with the entire crew that’s been handling things so far!
Polyglot Conference itself is a yearly conference held as an open spaces event. The way open space conferences work is described well on Wikipedia were it is referred to as Open Spaces Technology.
The crowds amass to order the chaos of tracks.
The biggest problem with this conference, is that it’s technically only one day. I hope that we can extend it to two days for next year – and hopefully even have the Seattle and Portland branches go with an extended two day itenerary.
A counting system…
This year the break out sessions that that I attended included “Dev Tools”, “How to Be a Better Programmer”, “Go (Language) Noises”, other great sessions and I threw down a session of my own on “Distributed Systems”. Overall, great time and great sessions! I had a blast and am looking forward to next year.
By the way, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this at the beginning of this blog entry, but this is only THE BEGINNING OF SUMMER IN CASCADIA! I’ll have more coverage of these events and others coming up, the roadmap includes OS Bridge (where I’m also speaking) and Portland’s notorious OSCON.
Until the next conference, keep hacking on that next bad ass piece of software, cheers!
This is it, last string of introductions. Hope you’re registered.
Adam Baldwin is presenting…
Introducing NodeSecurity.io
Adam Baldwin
Adam Baldwin is a web app hacker, team lead at ^Lift Security and the CSO for &yet. Adam has presented at various security & dev conferences in the past including, DEFCON, Djangocon, Toorcamp and RealtimeConf.
The node.js community is growing at an amazing rate. At the time of writing there was 27,757 modules publised on npm. Have you ever stopped to think just what you are putting into your project when you npm install somebody else’s module? Do you trust that code? This is an insane project to find out the answer to that question.
This talk will introduce the nodesecurity.io project, it’s goals, current results in hopes of inspiring involvement and receiving feedback directly from the node community!
Unix philosopher and methodological reductionist etc.
Learn how to make computer sounds in node and the browser with the same api.
Using just a single function that takes a parameter t, time in seconds, and returns an amplitude between -1 and 1, inclusive, you can create music!
You can use this basic approach to write songs and synthesizers. In javascript. Yay!
Ryan Jarvinen is presenting…
Clustering Node.js on OpenShift
Ryan
Ryan Jarvinen is an Open Platform Advocate working with RedHat’s OpenShift team. He lives in Oakland, California and is passionate about open source, open standards, open government, and digital rights. You can reach him as ‘ryanj’ on twitter, github, and IRC.
Learn how to automate builds, deployment tasks, and application scaling as we use OpenShift’s platform architecture on-demand to build your own git-based release pipeline, including: development, testing, staging, and cloud-scaling production environments for node.js.
Mike autobiogrophies himself as, “I’m Mike, a developreneur based out of Austin, Texas and connoisseur of fine code. I’m also the creator of Sails.js, the open-source BaaS framework which allows front-end developers to build robust, scalable APIs using only JavaScript.
My first startup was in social television, where I saw the need for more efficient, easy-to-use solutions for realtime social features. Because of that, I got involved in Node.js early on, and after building a few early apps, recognized the need for an MVC solution to normalize patterns. Early last year, I founded Balderdash, a UX-focused mobile and web studio, which has given me an excellent opportunity to build out and utilize Sails.js in production.”
Sails.js makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is designed to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the more modern, data-oriented style of web app development. It’s especially good for building realtime features like chat.
Sails empowers UX and design teams to build hi-fi prototypes in no time without waiting for the back-end to be finished. This means focusing more resources on the user experience, which means better products. One Sails.js project at a time, companies move their legacy architecture over to a simpler, more efficient Node.js cloud. Each new client-side code base is more maintainable, since it’s built using the universal language of the internet: a RESTful JSON API.
Chris Dickinson is presenting…
Implementing Git in JavaScript & the Browser: A Case Study
Chris
Chris describes himself as “I make silly things with JavaScript: I particularly love bit-twiddling and WebGL-based projects. I live in Portland OR and work at Urban Airship as a JavaScript engineer.”
Git is one of my favorite things to hack on. It’s long been my goal to get a working (workable?) implementation of git running in pure JS, in the browser. My first attempt two years ago failed; and for a long time I’ve let the thought bounce around in the back of my head.
Spurred on by the recent interest in js-git, I recently restarted the journey towards an in-browser git, in order to help creationix deliver the best possible js-git. Newly armed with browserify and the small-module ethos, I’ve come much closer to a working git in browser and Node, and in the process have really put browserify and its shims through their paces.”
This talk will be comprised of:
A quick intro to the git object model and transport protocol
How browserify and the small module ethos have enabled great successes in the project.
Difficulties encountered in the process, both with Node.JS itself and with browserify, and how I’ve worked through them.
How I’ve diagnosed and worked through various performance issues.
Where is this project going?
…and the fifth iteration of Node PDX Introductions!
Zach Bobb is presenting…
Building a Computer In Your Browser
Zach the TriMet Ticket Man!
Zach is a mobile engineer with GlobeSherpa working hard to bring you the app that will let you buy TriMet tickets on your phone.
Want to learn how computers work under the hood while learning Web technologies? Come learn about the Von Neumann 51, a series of tutorials that will take you through building a computer from the ground up in JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.
The talk will start by laying out some of the motivation behind the project and then demonstrate some of the components people will build through the tutorials: logic gates, adder circuits, displays, etc. The end of the talk will demo a prototype of the vN51.
Some of the technologies in this talk are: D3 | A JavaScript library for dynamic data-driven SVG graphics HTML5 Canvas | Pixel manipulation for display output
Paul Jungwirth is presenting…
Handling Errors with Cluster and Domains
Paul
Paul will jump into,
“Node’s callback pattern makes error handling difficult: throwing an exception kills the entire node process, terminating all current requests, and every callback initiates a new stack, so stacktraces are terse and don’t indicate how you got where you died. You can solve these problems using some newer features of Node called clusters and domains. This talk with explore using these tools for better error handling.“
Forrest Norvell is presenting…
Do as I say, not as I do: Node in the real world
Forrest
Forrest is a software engineer who has spent the better part of the last two years working with Node full-time, first working on bringing Singly’s Locker Project up to web scale, and then exploring the wilds of monitoring the performance of Node applications for New Relic. He has learned an unreasonable amount about JavaScript, V8, libuv, and making it all work well in the real world.
Forrest has spent the last year plumbing the depths of Node for New Relic, as he brings support for Node to New Relic. It’s a process that has required ingenuity, guile, and the willingness to break a lot of otherwise very sensible rules. He will take you on a tour of some of the more powerful but dangerous tools in the JavaScript toolbox: monkey patching, working with Node’s internals, and mixing synchronous and asynchronous code without setting your hair on fire. Charlie Key is presenting…
Building a Multiplayer World for Pillow Pets
Charlie
Charlie is Co-founder of Modulus, a premier Node.js hosting solution. He has spent the last six-years working in the software, where he has created over a dozen production websites and applications for many global brands.
He is also a core contributor on Pulse game engine and one of members of the team who developed Pillow Pets World.
The talk will dive into the design goals, architecture and end result of creating this massive virtual world. Come see how Pulse (a HTML5 game engine) and Node.js were combined to create a fast, expandable, mobile ready world. Targeting a game at 10,000,000 people? Then come and find out how Pillow Pets World was built. Pillow Pets World is a virtual world built for millions of kids. Scalability and performance were aspects that were included from the start.
The technologies included in this talk are:
Pulse | HTML5 Game Engine Node.js | Scalable small servers Socket.io | Real-time communication using Web sockets Redis | Small in memory storage used for pub/sub communication between servers
Adam is a Portland native (straight out of the Simpsons) with a penchant for software and systems integration. 8-bit gamer, seasoned professional, perpertual noob. Specialization is for insects.
Learn how easy it is to create your own monitoring system! Hobbyist components and a rich ‘maker’ community puts advanced system designs well within the reach of your average software wonk. Stop planning and start building!
Our case study is ‘GroMon’, a solution for monitoring a tiny indoor lettuce garden. Our wireless sensor keeps track of temperature and humidity, if the plants get too hot or too cold then we are notified via text message.
We will discuss the design goals and architecture, as well as component selection, prototyping and debugging steps. With a little bit of programming skill and patience, anyone can build this network. Learn how to easily extend this solution for your own use.
Our stack is Node.js running on a Raspberry Pi. We connect over Bluetooth to an Arduino hosting a single sensor. All components can be purchased off-the-shelf, no soldering is required and the total cost is around $80. Code and bill of materials is available on GitHub, let’s hack!
Aron Racho is presenting…
Jive Purposeful Places SDK – A NodeJS Bromance
Aron
Aron Racho is a Senior Software Developer at Jive Software. Aron’s background has primarily been in Java, about 10 years in. He is a relatively recent convert to Javascript, and server-side Javascript in particular. Though relatively new to NodeJS, he has been smitten by its fluency, flexibility, and superb design. One might even say a Bromance has been started.
Ok, get ready, this description for this sessions is HUGE!
Jive Software’s latest cloud release enables 3rd party developers to easily push data marshalled from external systems of record such as Salesforce into Jive. Our aim is to publish a developer framework and API which makes it drop-dead simple — and fun — to get up-and-going from scratch, or easily integrate into an existing framework. We chose NodeJS precisely for those reasons:
High developer adoption
High velocity development — javascript! no compilation required
Best-in-class IDE support (IntelliJ for example)
Native support for REST and HTTP
Excellent package management system (NPM == maven the Good Parts)
Tons of great libraries
Amazing documentation, well organized, very easy to get started instantly
Our framework is built on Express, and is designed to be programmed by “convention: fill in the blanks with logic specific to your application, and as long as you’ve satisfied the contract, the framework automatically:
Wires up routes required for configuring your integration
Notifies your listeners for integration life cycle events (integration created; destroyed; updated, etc.)
Executes recurrent tasks you’ve scheduled
Handles persistence of required objects. We have support for 3 types of persistence out of the box — in-memory, file, and MondoDB.
The framework is designed for developers who want to as quickly as possible start integrating a 3rd party service with Jive, with minimum setup.
For those interested in integrating Jive into an existing NodeJS Express app, we are going to make the underlying API available to developers, allowing them finer grained control over the setup of their integration. This API will be the same one underlying the mechanics of the aforementioned framework.
For my presentation, I will be describe how we used NodeJS as the basis for this framework and API. Please note at the time of this proposal, we’ve created the framework, and are now in the process of refining the API so that it can be used independently of the framework.
Christopher Meiklejohn is presenting…
An Introduction to Functional Reactive Programming
Chris Meiklejohn
Christopher Meiklejohn is a Software Engineer with Basho Technologies, Inc. where he focuses on building rich web applications for Riak using Erlang and JavaScript. Before joining Basho, he worked at Swipely, a loyalty program startup based in Providence where he maintained critical infrastructure components written in Ruby. Christopher currently serves as one of the maintainers of Rubygems.org.
Chris also knows a thing or three about this show… called The Wire… he could probably speak entirely in quotes solely from The Wire and still make complete sense. So throw a quote out, I bet he’ll catch it.
There is no doubt that todays web applications continue to grow in adoption, replacing their desktop counterparts in all areas of computation. Essential to their growth is their ability to provide near-native performance and rich user experiences. As these applications grow in essential complexity, they also grow in accidental complexity due to the imperative callback processing style found in most web applications. The asynchronous nature of most of these applications also further compounds the issues due to guarantees around message ordering, and a level of indirection required in callbacks handling events.
Functional reactive programming is one approach for mitigating accidental complexity, using a declarative and composable data-flow model. During this talk, we’ll look at the history of functional reactive programming, some JavaScript implementations of FRP, and finally some ClojureScript implementations of FRP and examples on how to get started with using functional reactive programming.
Max Ogden is presenting…
Minecraft.js
Max Ogden – Penciled and colored!
Max used to live here in Portland, and at some point defected to work on noble causes with Code for America. Since then he’s been an Oaktown Coder (Oakland, the other city near San Francisco).
In January of 2013 he started the Voxel.js Project. Since he and contributors have generatored nearly 100 node modules related to 3D game development and distribution. Examples including voxel rendering and first person controls and physics. On the main voxel-engine the project has received over 50 pull requests from 20 contributors. All of this since January. Max is going to dive into this effort and what inspiration people have taken to dive into game development with JavaScript.
Brock Whitten is presenting…
Mighty Messaging Patterns
Brock Whitten
Best know for having co-created PhoneGap, Brock went on to work at Joyent where he created the Public API for the beloved (and now sunset) No.de Platform. He’s now working on the Harp Platform where he’s worked with a team to have created a dead simple publishing platform that uses Dropbox as its deployment mechanism. Much has been learned, he’s read to share.
He describes his course as, “Messaging is the lifeblood of distributed systems yet it is often treated as an afterthought when applications are architected. Few get passed the point of tacking on a message queue to fire and forget tasks with no visibility into what is happening on the system. I’m here to tell you we can do better. That Messaging can do more for us than just put tasks in the background. By combining basic messaging paradigms we can build powerful distributed systems with full awareness of what is happening around the network. And we can do it all in pure JavaScript.
In this talk, I will start with a crash course on the basic messaging patterns push/pull, pub/sub, and request/reply and then show a real example of how we have combined these patterns to build a custom message broker that we have used to build a fully distributed and modular architecture for the Harp Platform. I will share details about what we have learned and common pitfalls to avoid when building a messaging system for your needs.
Basic outline for the talk:
how messaging can be useful
crash course on the basic message patterns
how to get started with zeromq/axon
common pitfalls when in production
proven trade secrets we have learned
By the end of the talk, my hope is that everyone will have a new appreciation for what can be achieved with massaging and will know where to begin when attempting to integrate messaging into their next project. I feel this aspect of building modern web applications is often overlooked and viable techniques need to be shared and discussed.”
Johnny 5 and I say “THANKS AND HIGH FIVES!!!”
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