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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

Aaron Stannard Presenting “Building Node.JS Applications on Windows Azure” @ #NodePDX

January 30, 2012
Unknown Code Ramblings
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This is the tenth in a series of posts about the individual speakers lined up for…

Aaron Stonnard

Aaron Stannard

Aaron is coming at us from southern California, but don’t hold that against him. He’s going to shed some light on the Windows Azure support around Node.js. Yup, you read that right, Microsoft is all googly over open source these days. Aaron describes his presentation thus:

Microsoft is moving towards making Windows Azure a PaaS cloud capable of hosting applications of any shape, size, framework, and programming language, and Node.JS is one of the first non-.NET technologies we’ve made a first-class citizen on Windows Azure.

In this talk you’ll get a brief overview of Windows Azure itself, iisnode, and what the dev / test / production lifecycle looks like for Node.JS applications built for Windows Azure.

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!

Eric Redmond to Present “A CouchDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Node.JS Circus” @ #NodePDX

January 25, 2012
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This is the sixth in a series of posts about the individual speakers lined up for…

Eric is going to get you pumped up about NoSQL, and depoying to NodeSQL, CouchDB, Neo4j, Redis, and maybe another solution or two! So buckle your big data belts on, this is gonna get huge. From Eric,

NoSQL databases are fun, and we’ve all wired up a Node.js project to use one. But what about two?

What about *three*?

That’s what’s on the docket for this talk. We’ll do **all the things**:

- Walk through a (very) quick intro on CouchDB, Neo4j, and Redis.
- Then learn how to interact with these very different databases using Node.js.
- Then wire them up into a single web application (using Bricks.js, for good measure)
- Write it all in CoffeeScript… *buzzword overload!!!*

If you do not walk out of this talk excited and maybe a little confused, I will have failed.

Eric Redmond

Eric Redmond

Eric describes himself as, “I work at MongoHQ and has spent the last 17 years writing a book on databases (seemingly). I also just might be the world’s most over-educated and under-qualified marketing directors.” <- His words, I’d never say such a thing about him.

If you’d just like to come and check out Eric’s 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!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

Kyle Drake to Present “Building a Real-time geolocation game with Geoloqi using Node.JS” @ #NodePDX

January 24, 2012
Unknown Code Ramblings
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This is the fifth in a series of posts about the individual speakers lined up for…

Kyle Drake, Chillin'

Kyle Drake, Chillin'

Kyle Drake, a Geoloqi Coder & frequent co-hackathon hacker & tea drinker I know, will be presenting how Kyle and team at Geoloqi built a real-time geolocation game with Node.js and the Geoloqi API & Services. A quick description of Kyle’s presentation,

There are very powerful things you can do with Node.JS, particularly with projects needing a lot of I/O operations. At Geoloqi, we have used Node.JS and Socket.IO to build a JavaScript client that allows our developers to map real-time tracking on a browser with almost no code needed. Our first project using this is MapAttack!, a truly real-time location-based geofencing game.

Hear about how we made the game, how we made it real-time, where we’re going, and where Node.JS is going to have a role in it. I will also cover what it took to build Geoloqi’s Real-time Streaming API, and how it can be used to bring real-time location functionality to existing applications.

I will also talk a little bit about the Reactor pattern, the mysterious thing underneath that powers Node.JS. I’ll discuss what Reactor patterns are good for (and not so good for), and compare them with threads. I will also compare Node.JS’s reactor pattern to ones in other languages.

Kyle Drake is a many-hats web developer and entrepreneur that speaks multiple languages, and has worked with numerous startups to build their infrastructure. As a software engineer for Geoloqi, he is helping to build their geolocation platform and real-time location-streaming API. He previously developed some of the top Facebook applications as a senior Facebook app developer for Dachis Group.

In his free time, Kyle likes writing more code, working on web site ideas, riding his bicycle around Portland, hiking in the mountains, skiing, reading anthropology and tech books, and he’s fairly good at playing the Star Trek pinball machine at Ground Kontrol.

If you’d just like to come and check out Kyle’s 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!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

Some JavaScript + REGEX goo to get query strings from your HREF/URI/URL

August 6, 2011
How-to, Javascript, Unknown Code Ramblings
2 Comments

I guess there is a library somewhere to do this, but I couldn’t find it fast enough so I spit this contraption out. It’s a function that grabs the value from a URI/URL query string. Yes, writing those nasty REGEXs about drove me nuts! ;) Maybe I can save at least one soul out there some trouble. If you see an enhancement option or have ideas, please comment and let me know!

function GiveMeTheQueryStringParameterValue(parameterName) {
    parameterName = parameterName.replace(/[\[]/, "\\\[").replace(/[\]]/, "\\\]");
    var regex = new RegExp("[\\?&]" + parameterName + "=([^&#]*)");
    var results = regex.exec(window.location.href);
    if (results == null)
        return "";
    else
        return decodeURIComponent(results[1].replace(/\+/g, " "));
}

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