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My Updates

Naked Portland Techster, Pizza & PaaS with CloudFoundry and MORE!

April 19, 2012
Meetups n' Such, My Updates
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Is that an attention getting headline or what!!  SNAP!

But I digress. Let’s hit on each of those topics. The first thing, is that everybody and anybody in the Seattle Metropolitan area should head out to Bellevue and have Pizza and talk PaaS with myself and others at Tier 3. We’re going to show some Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Java, and ASP.NET MVC Demoes running on Cloud Foundry & Iron Foundry, how they interoperate and answer any questions that come up.

We’ll all of course eat some pizza too!  :)

So swing over to Tier 3 on the 25th and check out the latest Cloud Foundry PaaS Software and Iron Foundry .NET Extensions for Cloud Foundry.

Naked Portland Techster ( I just couldn’t help writing a little something about this… )

A techster got “checked” by the TSA exactly like they seem to want everybody. Nude. He gave em’ exactly what they wanted by stripping down right there in the airport. Ironic how sometimes, people don’t want what they ask for. hmmmm…  anyway.

The More… Part.

Late this week I’ve got a cool write up of how and why I’ve setup my workspace the way I have. Lots of gadgets. After that I’ll be hitting the “OS-X Development Environment vs. Windows 7 Development Environment” review. Again, there will be gadgets and software gadgets.  Until then, cheers!

Wrapped Up @ The Fort of Awesome, on to the Iron Foundry, and new Tiers…

March 28, 2012
.NET Bits, Cloud Speak, Conferences, Meetups n' Such, My Updates
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New update and bits coming up in the near term. I wrapped up my work with AppFog’s Fort of Awesome and am now putting together blog articles & technical material for New Relic these days. They’re an extremely great company with an absolutely stellar team. However you may be asking, “Adron, YOU WRITE CODE ALL THE FREAKING TIME, you’ve got to be doing more than blog entries!!” and you’d be right. These blog entries are more than just opinions and such, I’ll be putting together demoes and some hard core examples of distributed architectures, trending against big data, node.js hackery, and all sorts of other stuff. But there is also my next update below that’s a lot of fun code…

Tier 3, Federated Clouds, and Iron Foundry

I’ve stepped in to take the lead on the Iron Foundry Project (so go sign up and fork it!!) and to work on the stability, governance, and code around Cloud Foundry too! It’s going to be a blast! In addition to that I’m helping to build some cool things at Tier 3. In the near future I’ll have a lot more information regarding what these things are.

At Tier 3 we have a massive Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure offering. It’s a pretty impressive setup, so much so that I’m leading some of the efforts there, so I’m not just saying that! Keep an eye on us too, because we’ll have some very cool things coming up (did I say that already?)  :)

Cloud Foundry Hackathon PDX, Cloud Foundry Open Tour, and Coder Society

Cloud Foundry Hackathon PDX

The Cloud Foundry Hackathon is on April 14th at Puppet Labs. Check out the Lanyrd Site and Calagator for calendar and RSVP. This is going to be an awesome event which will also be in partnership and extension of some of the work we’ll start at Coder Society on April 7th. So if you’re into hacking on the Cloud Foundry core bits or if you’re interested in hacking on apps deployed to Cloud Foundry come and hack with us. In addition I’ll be putting on two workshops:

  • On Premise, Off Premise Cloud Foundry => We’ll dive into, and get hands on, with identifying and connecting Cloud Foundry Environments regardless of their premise. Removing boundaries, that’s what this is about.
  • Cloud Foundry + Iron Foundry and Bridging the Gaps => Now we’re talking FULL stack across every major stack. Iron Foundry, the missing linq in Cloud Foundry. Adding .NET & having it play nicely with Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and more. We’ll also dive into SQL Server, Mongo, and how to make the best use of RDBMS + NoSQL bits. Making the most of the abilities with PaaS.

Cloud Foundry Open Tour, The PDX Stop

The VMware sponsored Cloud Foundry Open Tour has a stop lined up epic Portlandia! There will be a pretty bad ass crew there of people you’ll want to meet and talk to about Cloud Foundry’s direction, design, enterprise cloud offerings such as Stackato, Tier 3, and others. On twitter, if you don’t follow these people and you’re stepping into the future with PaaS, you should follow them (click their names for their respective twitter account):

…and others, come attend and you’ll get to meet them all. I’ll also be there and you can follow me on twitter too if you want (@adron).  ;)

Our good friends from ActiveState will also be there, bringing their awesome Stackato Cloud Foundry based offering! The Iron Foundry Project also just released full support for the Stackato based Micro Cloud Foundry VM with new Micro Iron Foundry bits too.

Coder Society…

Oh yeah, the Coder Society, I’ve got the info on the Coder Society Inaugural meet up announcement coming tomorrow first thing in the morning at 5am. If you haven’t checked out Coder Society yet, hit the site and join the list. No, don’t get up that early, I’m just guessing that’s when I’ll be done with it and click on the publish button!  ;)

OS Bridge 2012++ Hacker Lounge++

February 21, 2012
Cloud Speak, Conferences, Infrastructure, My Updates, Platform (as a Service), Presentations and Speaking
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I’ve submitted some talks to OS Bridge so I hope to see a ton of people there! :) The two sessions that I’ve put forth, if accepted of course, go something like this.


Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service (PaaS) (45 minute session)

This session will cover the major advances of platform as a service technology, what’s available in the OSS space to enable faster, easier, higher quality software development cycles in the cloud. The session will complete with a demo of PAAS technology in use, deploying a highly scalable, distributed & dispersed web application.

This session will show why PAAS is the way of the future for application deployments. Enterprise, small business, and especially startups will want to learn more about the available PAAS OSS technology and also learn about what is coming in the near future.

The presentation is setup to not only cover the immediate technologies of IAAS and SAAS in relation to PAASbut also real life examples of how PAAS gives a competitive advantage to any software development effort.

I’ll be using a presentation, asking the audience questions to involve them, and also some prospective video along with a real production style deployment of code to involve the audience.

Putting It Together, Letting Apps Lead the Cycle, TDD in the Cloud (1 hr 45 min)

I’ll be taking a deep dive into cloud architectures and how to build applications, generally at the PaaS level mixed with a little IaaS, to get people rolling with high velocity, high quality, and without the need to worry about the little things.

Want to learn about why PaaS and cloud computing is altering the very fabric of the development cycle? Want to know how to dive in with some abstractions and behavioral practices on the cloud, using PaaS, to bring apps, prototypes, and UX to market faster than anyone else? I’ll be touching on all of these things during this long form session. The sessions will step through these core concepts and ideas.

  • How to get up and running using cloud computing technologies and specifically to take advantage of PaaS providers.
  • How to bring UX designs and prototypes into a usable state even faster.
  • How to bridge that gap between development, test, QA, user acceptance testing, staging, and production (or whatever environments…) without blowing the bank.
  • How to scale, once the cycle is in place and continuous deployment is ready.

OS Bridge == Great Time, Great Experience, and Lots of Learning

OS Bridge is by far one of the best conferences in the northwest, in addition it isn’t stupidly expensive (sign up now for a cheap $225 bills (in April it bounces up to $300, so hurry up, that $75 bucks will feed your for the whole week at the spectacular Portland food carts!)
Either way, I hope to see all you bad ass coders there so I can buy ya some drinks, eat some meals with everybody, and starting thinking about the next awesome thing!

What am I Doing? What do I do?

February 19, 2012
My Updates
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The meme has been going around with the “This is what X person or group thinks I do” and then “This is what I really do…”  It got me thinking, so what do I really do and what do people think I do?

At that thought I stumbled. What do I do? I’m kind of rogue, a little bit of a wild card. Always have been, always will be, but in a good way. At least I’d like to think. Beware now, if you’re not into understanding the “feeling” side of things, you may not want to read this. With that warning, here I go…

There are a few things that I’m good at and these things traverse a wide spectrum of technical, writing, and art. I speak and think in abstractions, grasping the psychological need and business focus of companies and people, then implement in the technical realm. I have been told, that I do that pretty well. I try, amid frustrations that I’m sure most developers face, to strive toward making things better, faster, cooler, and up the bad ass on whatever I work on.

Lately though, I’ve stepped upped my game to push toward and focus on cloud technologies. I’ve been studying, implementing, and generally working in that realm of the technology industry for about 2 years now, but it has all been just a personal focus. Kind of a “for fun” type of drive. Now I’m working in the cloud realm 100% of the time. In addition I’m working with people who think, breath, and eat technology and apps and how it all can fit together to make life better.

Beyond that technical realm I’ve been doing something else that I have an aptitude for. Socializing and networking. I’ve taken it upon myself, since I like working with, meeting, and coordinating between people. I work to find the connections that should be made, to bridge gaps in technologies with partnerships, and to push forward key pieces of technology that I personally find interesting. All that, I’ve decided to do myself and have struck out to continue doing that. Things like Node PDX, my blog entries over on New Relic, the AWS User Group (in Seattle), Hadoop & Big Data w/ (@lusciouspear, Devops, PDX ALT.NET, PADNUG, and many other groups I’m working to connect, extend, and help spread the knowledge in these groups and bring and inclusiveness to these events for people in less “tech enabled” parts of the world. I have some pretty big goals in the next few months. But my aim is good so far and things are looking good.

So where does that put me? An implementing, artistic, weird-o, nerd, metal head, musician, who networks, partners, and codes? I suppose all of those things tend to work. Maybe my explanation made things clearer or maybe things are just as cloudy as before (pun? oh dear). Either way, I’ll be in touch with many of you out there hacking on the code, creating the next disruptive technology, and rocking the world while kicking ass!

Eventually, I’m hoping to kick that little dent in the world.  ;)

My Announcement: Cloud Foundry is Awesome, PaaS Rules, DevOps/NoOps/AppOps is The Future, & I’m Stepping to Bat!

February 3, 2012
Conferences, Meetups n' Such, My Updates, Unknown Code Ramblings
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Alright…  deep breath. The last few weeks, no wait, the last few months have been hella busy. I finally got my act together and have set some real goals. One of them is stepping up to bat in the Cloud Computing/Utility Computing Industry, instead of just being a mere critique, writer, and sideline gazer I’ll be in the full battle on Monday. The reason Monday, is because today is my last official day at Russell Investments.

Beautiful Russell Investments Building in Seattle

Beautiful Russell Investments Building in Seattle

Working at Russell has been awesome. The team I got to work with regularly used advanced practices (which I like to think of as practices that everybody uses, but I’m aware of reality) – such as TDD, BDD, and Pairing. We did a mild form of Scrum, mostly to help leadership manage to the even higher up management. It works really well. We have happy customers, solid products, a deployment success rate that never had us at work late, and to top it off I got to work on net profitable projects. I love seeing success across the board!

The the guys I worked with the most pairing, TDDing & BDDing, and generally making the math work – Jeff Schumacher @codereflection & Scott Koon @lazycoder – cheers, beers on me in the near future (like at 2:00pm!). To the host of others…

  • Kelly – Thanks for that whitty sardonic 5-year old humor that I love and adore! You kick ass!
  • Don – Thanks for keeping the QA ship headed in the right direction and helping me coordinate, get things out the door, and providing comraderie every day.
  • James – Test, QA, thanks for destroying any hope that a bug may make it to production. Keep throwing out those lines of Russian to scare the passersby, superb indeed!
  • Chris Sjoholm – Thanks for troubleshooting JavaScript, enjoying the TekPub jQuery Videos, and hacking the jQuery/JavaScript until it works. …and I had to use your name because nobody can say  it!  mwhahahahaahahaa!
  • Castle – Thanks for confusing me by having the name Castle, since we use Castle Windsor, and oh yeah, thanks for being a very knowledge domain person ( <- Note I’m not in HR, I didn’t call you a “resource” ). Your random jabs, jests, and relaxed vibe always brought ++ to the work day.
  • Lane – Dude, seriously, boss++, awesome, ski dude, punk rocker, gets wooed and honored in Seattle Coffee Works, great guy, rock star, Scrum King, Lean Advocate, Get Shit Done Well guy… I think I summed ya up. Thanks a billion! You going to bat to destroy the insanity that is TFS I will never forget!
  • Jeff – Thanks for the coding, helping me think, and the death metal, black metal, Deicide show (along with attempts to make other shows, which I fail miserably at), etc…  You rock dude, keep it up, never stop, stay a little crazy, it’ll make those bus rides all that much more fun.  ;)
  • John & Terry – You guys were like the silent brain trust, with Terry piping in with the announcement that Corp IT does some inanely illogical things, for the whole floor. I seriously have enjoyed your public service announcements!  John, thanks for all the awesome food suggestions over the last year +.
  • Sree – Rock that Mac dude, enjoy your family, and stay that happy guy you are. Keep hitting the code and love the coder life.
  • Sai – Hey wait, where’d you go?  Oh yeah, enjoy the Bellevue. It was fun, I learned that there are only like 5 countries that have people driving on the wrong side of the road because of you!!  :P  But seriously, great working with you, see ya around for sure!
  • Skoon, Scott, I mean Scott Koon – Ok, had to use your whole name because of all the iterations we’ve used over the many months. Needless to say, Herding Code rocks…
  • Cefe – You, the invisible power that be, to right wrongs and keep the ship sailing, we didn’t get to work together that much, but I always felt a very positive morale with you at the helm. Cheers, will miss working under your command.
  • Hassan – Again, like Cefe, thanks for commanding the ship from the strategic command center on high. You also, kept our morale up, kept the alignments clear, and led us to the battle.
  • Michael O’Shea – Thanks for the zillion great conversations, the breaks, music chit chat, OS-X & Android utilizations & hacking, Star Trek knowledge beyond Gene Roddenberry himself. Hats off!
  • Scott S. – Thanks for the NSFW jokes, connections, networking knowledge, etc. You’ve been a great comrade, will miss ya…  and yes, I’m still working on the logistics around Alaska, keep me abreast in Facebook if ya would. Cheers! Thanks for those other things too.  ;)
  • Aeden – Sucks we didn’t get to pair together, we’ll do that soon, at a conference or something! Keep it wild, stay adventurous, and enjoy the Indian Food.
  • Lisa – Thanks for the NSFW moments, the Shadow IT, and the snarky comments. The whole team enjoys your input into the kittie cats these days, so don’t stop. Cheers! …and thanks for the chance to further infect the company with the awesomeness that is Shadow IT!

Ok, I’m sure I missed somebody, I’ll owe them double beers! It’s been great, absolutely wonderful time….

…but where am I going?

There are some secrets that will remain. Such as what specific companies I’m going to work with, who, where, what, and why, that will stay a mystery at this point. There are a few things that are happening that I can and will elaborate on right now. (if you were waiting for something technology related, this is the part, sorry for all the sobbing and tearful moments above). For the others topics, I’ll provide a juicy update in the near future (I’m thinking in about 1-2 months).

Cloud Foundry

Over the coming months I will be doing extensive work with, and maybe even on, Cloud Foundry. Will it be with Ruby, C#, or JavaScript? Well, actually it will be a little of all three. Yes indeed.

Cloud Architecture

This is an area where I’ll be doing a ton of work, related almost entirely to PaaS (Platform as a Service). I will have blog entries coming about this topic through various medium, which will include my ongoing series on New Relic’s Blog (Part 1 & Part 2 of Removing the OS Barrier with PaaS which is up now). In addition, there will definitely be a lot of open source software in my future!

TriMet Light Rail

TriMet Light Rail

Community

One of the things that is hugely important to me is community. Local community, tech community, neighborhood community, and city community. With that there are a few other changes that will be pretty big for me over the next few months. I’m making a huge shift where and how I’m going to be living. I’ll be spending a whole lot of time in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and likely Vancouver BC, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. There is a strong connecting fiber for all of these cities around livability and building strong communities, something a lot of other cities lack. But one slight change, since my home base is in Seattle currently, is that I’ll still be very active in Seattle but will be making my home base Portland again, with living arrangements for my frequent visits available in Seattle and San Francisco. To summarize, I’ll be swapping some bus commutes for light rail & streetcar commutes!  :)  Thx to all who are helping me out with this complexity!

Panoramic Portland - Click for a massive full size image

Panoramic Portland - Click for a massive full size image

Tech Community

Along with this slight shift in geographic location & traveling a lot more I’ve been pushing forward (you might have realized from the string of speaker introductions) on getting events organized. I’m thinking that this will become a recurring habit of mine since I sincerely enjoy the work I do and meeting, coding, and helping people to build a larger community of technology mega-awesomeness!

Which brings me to my last mention, go RSVP for Node PDX, it’s going to be a good time!

So all in all, cheers, and on to new great things and working to making a little dent in this universe. :D

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