My Updates

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

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

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

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

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.

Devops Invades with PaaS & CloudFoundry

January 11, 2012

.NET Bits, Architecture, Cloud Speak, My Updates, Platform (as a Service)

Writing

I started writing a series which is being published by New Relic around “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service“. Part 1 is live NOW – so go give it a read! :)

Working

Currently I’ve been working up some Enterprise Prototypes using the IronFoundry Technology. The idea is to provide a seamless deployment option for Enterprises that may have a very mixed environment of public and private computing options, virtual and non-virtualized environments, and any array of other capabilities. I’ve also been toying around with Windows 2008 Server Core, which I’ll have more about shortly.

Public Cloud AppFog

AppFog provides a public facing PaaS supporting PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, MongoDB and a lot of other packages. They’re currently in beta right now, which I was fortunate enough to snag access to, but I’m sure the covers will come off soon enough! The underlying technology is built on CloudFoundry, providing a robust, scalable, and capable infrastructure connection to provide PaaS on.

In addition to AppFog there is the CloudFoundry.com offering, which I’ve tested out a little bit, but mostly focused on AppFog and on building out…

Private Cloud Capabilities w/ Public Cloud Style Infrastructure

I’ve built out some images to test out how CloudFoundry and IronFoundry works. I did pull down the provided virtual machines but I’m also building out my own to understand it better. The Ruby + C# that I’ve seen from the VMware crew & Tier 3 team has been great so far (I always dig reading some solid code).

Github CloudFoundry Code
Github IronFoundry Code fork for .NET

That’s it for this short review, more to come, and let me know what you think of my entry “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service” over on New Relic’s Blog.

Geoloqi, CivicApps, and TriMet API/SDKs

November 15, 2011

Conferences, Ideas, Meetups n' Such, My Updates

1 Comment

I’m heading off on yet another coding adventure this coming weekend. I can never get enough hackathons, startup weekends, and such. The energy, creativity, and learning is unbeatable at these types of events. This adventure will be mashing up a plethora of APIs (SDKs) and other capabilities to build something cool against. What it may be, what it will be, I’ve no idea yet. But here’s a quick summary of the companies & entities involved.

First a quick review of Geoloqi and what CivicApps are, the key sponsors and organizers of the event.

Geoloqi - Development

Description: Geoloqi is a private, real-time mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data. We’re a company that believes in doing more with location, and creating useful services for people and businesses.

CivicApps
Description: The aim is social change. The path is regional collaboration. The focus is local.

Technology is changing our relationship with government. Not so long ago government made decisions with little public input. Those days are gone. Today, information technology has redefined the structure and authority of government. The problems our communities face are beyond the capacity of government to resolve alone. Cooperation, collaboration and openness are no longer questions of opportunity; they are essential means of conducting our community’s business effectively. Every citizen can be an active participant in reshaping their world. WE are the government.

The CivicApps.org site aims to encourage every citizen to be an active participant by putting the data in their hands. The CivicApps.org site was developed to source, profile, and accelerate innovative ideas using Web and mobile technologies. The aim is social change. The path is regional collaboration. The focus is local.
Beyond these two organizations there are a host of others that are putting forth support through either the hackathon or the CivicApps Efforts.

Here’s a list of the entities involved in the CivicApps Project, click on the respective image to learn more about each one. All of these, in some way, form, or manner have contributed data or otherwise to the CivicApps Data.

An elected regional government, Metro helps you make the region an extraordinary place to live, work and play. Metro serves more than 1.5 million residents in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties and the 25 cities in the Portland region. Some of the related data & maps they provide are covered here.

Our belief is that mass transit ridership can increase dramatically through improved customer service.

We’ll help by:

Empowering passengers with information about waiting time.
Providing Transit Authorities and operators with a robust, reliable, and cost-effective way to manage fleets and communicate directly with passengers.
Reducing the uncertainty associated with public transportation.

TriMet provides bus, light rail and commuter rail service in the Portland metro area. Our transportation options connect people with their community, while easing traffic congestion and reducing air pollution—making our region a better place to live. TriMet’s developer resources are available here.