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Here’s the first of a series of introductions for the upcoming Node PDX Conference here in bright and sunny Portland, Oregon!

…and no, that isn’t sarcasm, it’s the summer time now so we’re allowed to have sun and warm weather! With that, the speakers for Node PDX!

Ward Cunningham presenting…

My Sensors Love Node.js

Ward Cunningham

Ward Cunningham

Who’s Ward? In his own findings, “The Oregonian describes me as the Old Growth of the Silicon Forest. I appreciate the thought but move way too fast to be compared to trees. Think of me as your intellectual immune system separating good technology infections from bad. Ditch that fever. Go with node.

As Ward describes this presentation, ”I’ve tested a half-dozen home sensor integration technologies over as many years and learned something important about architecture with each generation. I’ve replaced Arduino hardware with Teensy which offers much better USB support. I’ve replace C++ with Perl then with Ruby/Sinatra and now Node/Wiki each time feeling the fresh air of a more friendly and dynamic environment. I’ve plotted results with ascii-art, java-2d, flot and now d3.js which can be a career in itself. I’ll share the good parts of each of these and suggest how you will know when it is time for you to move on.

Nexxy presenting…

Realtime Hardware with Node.js

Nexxy

Nexxy

Key facts about Nexxy:

  • Nexxy has been hacking on things in one way or another SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.
  • Nexxy is also known for her occasional use of hyperbole as a literary device.
  • Nexxy first began hacking arduinos with node while she was working with a vegan strip club named Casa Diablo.
  • Nexxy is now enjoying her work with Ninja Blocks as they take over the world with the internet of things!
  • Nexxy inexplicably decided at the last second to write this section of the proposal in 3rd person, bullet form.

…and I have recreated this proposal section here for your information!

Join Nexxy & all for another installment of “Realtime Hardware with Node.js” as we take a look at just how exactly one should go about making a fool of themselves on stage with a bunch of electronics. We will cover the basics of getting started with hardware, demonstrate some cool tech, and conclude with a super rad (slightly hazy) and interactive dance party of epic (modest) proportions — if everyone cooperates. Questions are welcome throughout the presentation and audience members are encouraged* to participate.

* bribed with stickers

Jerry Seivert presenting…

Know Your Environment

Jerry Sievert

Jerry Sievert

Jerry is a conousier of fine beer, drinks and other assorted things. The relevant list of coarse includes Lego, trains and JavaScript. His own words of these things, being a drink or beautifully coded up application, “I love to build things!” summarizes up Jerry’s love of building perfectly!

Jerry will pose the question, “What if your software knew about its environment and could react?” With very basic electronics skills, and the ability to read a datasheet, you can be well on your way to a smarter and more responsive application. We will discuss some common hardware protocols and how to interface your code with them to build something all “teh aWeSOME“!

Hannah Fousanon presenting…

Optimizing Single-Page Javascript Websites for SEO

Hannah

Hannah

Hannah Fouasnon is a cofounder and lead engineer at DJZ based in San Francisco. While a full time hacker, she’s currently focusing on creating DJZ’s next single-page javascript website optimized around playing media and games. Former projects include Luckysort, a big-data, text-analytics company based in Portland, OR, where she implemented a large portion of the node.js architecture.

Hannah will cover how to create single-page javascript websites and enable developers to more easily support advanced web client features. For example, the persistent playing experience on soundcloud is supported by a single-page backbone.js architecture. One of the downsides when deciding on this architecture is that web crawlers have trouble indexing content, which can hurt seo and facebook sharing.

This presentation covers how we solve this problem at DJZ. The example will be a simplified angular.js application optimized for seo using primarily phantom.js. Viewers can follow along with code on github (link to come).

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

Have a last minute request, idea, comment or a speaking proposal? http://nodepdx.org/

I wasn’t able to get to Cascadia.js. Sometimes during the course of working smart and hard one misses the smart part and scheduling falls apart. Well, I messed up. I messed up and my scheduling got completed dorked for the last two weeks. What did that result in? I missed Cascadia.js, a codeathon in Spokane that I was putting together and to top it off I was missing Defrag in Denver – which really put me out because I was out of pocket personally for Defrag. Altogether it was a financial, logistical and scheduling nightmare for me.

To all, I apologize for my lapse in scheduling prowess!

Amid all of this mess, I’ve got some great new things coming up in the coming week for the OSS Projects I’m working on, the north west, a little emerald for Seattle, some earthy stuff for Portland and all around interesting tidbits here and there.

Before I go rambling on about those things, I wanted to leave this pre-weekend before Thanksgiving with some shout outs to the Cascadia.js Team & Presenters. Carter, Troy, Luc, Jerry, Laurie, Bobby & the whole lot of the team that put that together – you guys seriously ROCK!

The conference had a number of speakers, who totally rocked it, and here’s a few of my first views. I wasn’t there, as I said, so I was seriously stoked that the team put the videos online.

Angelina Fabbro @AngelinaMagnum presents

Matt Padwysocki @mattpodwysocki presents

Jason Denizac @leJden presents

Rick Waldron @rwaldron presents

Emily Rose @nexxylove presents

…and there ARE MORE PRESENTATIONS at Cascadia.js on youtube. Check them out, each is a blast!

Pull Request for People by Chris Williams

@voodootikigod <- but don’t look for him on Twitter… watch the ending keynote of his. It’s really good and we all need to think about what he is saying, seriously think about what he’s saying.

As for some of his questions he asks, I’ll have some answers to that – which I could indeed rattle off quickly, in response. I do say though, I don’t provide these answers to counter what he is saying. I do so only to state and reaffirm what he talked about. I am absolutely, 100% in agreement with what he is saying about the current state of the startup & tech sector.

With that, I’m going to spend some time with friends. Maybe even make some new ones. Cheers! :)

…as for Defrag, I’ll have more about that in the coming days too.

The Iron Foundry Team are big advocates of open source software. We write code across all sorts of languages, just like many of the development shops out there do. Sometimes we’re heavy on the .NET, other times we’re all up in some Java, Ruby on Rails, spooling up a Node.js Application or something else. So keeping with our love of open source and our polyglot nature we’ve created the Thor Project with three distinct apps.

Before jumping into the applications though, a little context for what and where Thor is in the grand scheme of things. We need to roll back to the Cloud Foundry Project to get into that. The Cloud Foundry Project is an open source project built around software for PaaS (Platform as a Service) which can be used to build your own PaaS internally or externally, in a cloud provider or directly on hardware. It’s your choice how, when and where you want to use it. For more context on PaaS check out my previous entry “The Confusions of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS“.

Thor Project

Cocoa for OS-X

Thor Odinson

Thor Odinson, God of Thunder

You know who Thor is right? He’s this mythic Norse God, also known as the God of Thunder. Since we’re all about bringing the hamma we welcomed Thor into our team’s stable of applications. So starting immediately we’ve released Thor into the realms for contributions and fighting the good open source software battle! If you’d like to join the effort, check out the github project and feel free to join us!

Technically, what is the Thor Application? This is a Cocoa Application built for OS-X that is used for managing, deploying and publishing applications to Cloud Foundry enabled and or Iron Foundry extended PaaS Environments.

.NET for Windows 7

The .NET Metro version of the Thor Application is also released via github with a provided installer. We’ve almost taken the same path, except of course for the very different UX and UI queues with Windows 7 and the Metro UX design guidelines.

WinRT for Windows 8

I wasn’t really sure what to call this version. Is it Metro or WinRT or Windows 8 or something else? Anyway, there is a project, it is albeit empty at this point, but it is the project where the Windows 8 version of Thor will go! For now get the Windows 7 version and install it on Windows 8, it won’t have touch interface support and things, but should work just like a regular application on Windows 8.

The Code

To get started with these, generally you’d just clone the repo and do a build, then get started checking out the code. There is one catch, for the OS-X version you’ll want to pull down the sub-modules with the following command.

git clone git@github.com:YourForkHere/Thor.git
git submodule update --init --recursive

Once you do that in XCode just make sure to then select the right project as the starting build project.

…then when the application is launched…

Thor Running in OS-X

Thor Running in OS-X

I’ll have more in the coming days and weeks about Thor & Iron Foundry. For now, check out the blog entry on the Iron Foundry Blog and subscribe there for more information.

This is the twelth in a series of posts about the individual speakers lined up for…

Subbu Allamaraju

Subbu Allamaraju

Subbu Allamaraju lives somewhere easy of Seattle, and is heading south in some way to come present at Node PDX!  Subbu has been working with HTTP based APIs for over four years, first at Yahoo! and now at eBay. As an architect and the creator of ql.io at eBay, he is responsible for improving the way HTTP is consumed by apps and pave way for near-real-time and conversational end user experiences. He was also one of the key drivers in adopting node.js at Yahoo.

Subbu will present…

Node.js is a great platform for building I/O bound apps. At eBay, my team applied node.js to solve a very common chore – how to get data from server-side HTTP APIs (or “web services”) quickly. ql.io is a result of this work.

ql.io consists of two parts:

  • A SQL + JSON inspired DSL for HTTP
  • A runtime that you can can either deploy as an HTTP gateway or use as a JS API for node.js based apps.

In this talk, I will show how you can use ql.io, the agility and performance gains that ql.io can bring in, and then take a deep dive into some of the design choices we made under the hood.

If you’d like to come and check out this presentation and the other kick ass presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar! Besides, what better reason to come visit the amazing city of Portland, Oregon than to come hack some node.js and chill for the weekend!

This is the eleventh in a series of posts about the individual speakers lined up for…

Scott Koon's Morning Expression Coming Into Work

Scott Koon's Morning Expression Coming Into Work

Scott Koon and I have worked facing each other for the last several months, hacking away at code. He’s been my go to guy for JavaScript Questions. Well now he’s decided to come down to Portland and give us a talk about Node.js. I’m sure along with his presentation he’ll bring some of his awesome snark too, so watch out! Scott describes his presentation as:

Everyone talks about Node.js in terms of non-blocking I/O and creating a web service or web site using JavaScript. But there is more to Node.js than just Sockets, ports, and protocols. I’ll explore some of the non-web exclusive uses of Node.js. Node can be a code compiler, an FTP server, a continuous integration server, a mail server, a deployment server, or an IRC server. Node can provide system reports, build and package your projects, and parse ePub books.

Herding Code

Herding Code

Scott has been working with JavaScript for a long time. He co-authored a book called “Professional JavaScript Frameworks” published by Wrox press. He’s also a familiar voice on the podcast Herding Code.

If you’d like to come and check out this presentation and the other kick ass presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar! Besides, what better reason to come visit the amazing city of Portland, Oregon than to come hack some node.js and chill for the weekend!

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