Time for the secret to be out of the bag. I’m currently working on contract with the awesome company of AppFog in the Fort of Awesome. Let me tell you, it is indeed awesome too! You might ask why I am working with them? How do I align with them? What is it they do?

Well you’re in luck, I’ll tell you all about it.

A few months ago, I started really digging into PaaS more. Not that I needed a reason, because I’m one of those “PaaS is the future” guys. I see this as a huge shift, kind of like when the developer world moved on from Assembly and punch cards to C & C++. It’s a big deal, and it is shifting the way companies build apps, the way they stay competitive, and stand out and above the herd with better process, better capabilities, and more efficient operations. PaaS, is the path to tomorrow.

What is AppFog building? Currently if you’re fortunate enough to have beta access, you may be able to play with the amazing PaaS offering that they’re putting together, and I’ve stepped forward to help put even more awesome into it with their kick ass team! So what will AppFog be aiming for? Well, it is an impressive list, check it out!

Help us out, take the poll and get your favorite technology added to the list! There’s a whole list of other things that will be coming too, this is just the basic big hitters list.  :)

In other news, Node PDX has just finished the list of speakers, we’re finalizing the rest of the sponsors and related things, and just waiting (ok, we’re really busting our butts over here running around to make sure this is a cool event for all you node coders!)

Some of the cool things you’ll be able to look forward to is…

…and awesome Saturday “open drinks” party w/ New Relic! So be sure to be there for that…

We’ve aimed to get everyone a Node PDX t-shirt…

…and more. So go get RSVPed already, time is running out.

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.

Problem: People often get together and talk about tech, but rarely get together and do something about tech.

The vast majority of user meetups end up as presentations. I must sadly say, often boring presentations that don’t really teach or demo all that much. Attendees often just come to talk afterwards or otherwise socialize, which is hugely important to the community. However there has to be a way more could be done. A better outcome would be to create a two way conversation, instead of the one way presentation, and to involve ourselves in creating solutions, new technology, and idea. In a few rare situations I have found groups that do something about this void. What’s their solution?

Solution: They actually get together, implement code, pair, and work together on problems. Kind of like a Hackathon, but way more often.

That’s what I’d like to create. To start off with, I’d like a group that is technology agnostic, is fairly skilled yet willing to pair and bring others up to speed, and simply gets together at least once per month to implement a specific project or effort that is predetermined by group submission and conversation (i.e. we’ll use a google group, e-mail list, or such). I think, and feel like there is enough support to get something like this started in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco (especially here), and Vancouver BC. My question is though, would you be interested in helping out, coordinating with me, and otherwise uniting coders to do more, learn more, and better themselves?

If you are interested, please leave a comment and help me out by answering a few questions:

1. Is “Coders United” a good name for the group? What ideas do you have?
2. Do you have a project or three or four that may be of interest for a group to get together and work on?
3. This type of group would probably need to meet for more than an hour, would you be able to meet for 3-4 hours, maybe even on a weekend to implement a full project?
4. What’s your preferred method of contact (e-mail, twitter, facebook, text message?) and how should I get in touch with you?

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!

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

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.

• Blog : http://lazycoder.com/
• Twitter : @lazycoder
• GitHub : http://github.com/skoon
• BitBucket :http://bitbucket.org/scott_koon
• Podcast : http://herdingcode.com

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!

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!

Daniel Erickson

Daniel Erickson will be coming to join us from San Francisco. Even though he’s no stranger to Portland, having lived here for many years.  These days Daniel is a Senior JavaScript Engineer at Yammer.com in San Francisco. He’s been working with Node.js since the 0.1.x days, and has built or helped out with a number of services including Storify.com, Geekli.st, and of course all the Yammer node services. Check him out on twitter to learn more.

• Company: http://yammer.com
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/techwraith
• Github: http://github.com/techwraith

Many frameworks have been created to allow you to build apps on Node.js – Express, Matador, and Flatiron to name a few. But none of these frameworks are built with development velocity, backwards compatibility, and speed. This is where Geddy steps in. Geddy is a framework built and battle tested by the JS team at Yammer. It’s currently running our upload service. During this talk I’ll walk you through building a basic web app with geddy, and show you how we used it to build a prototype mobile site for Yammer in less than 12 hours.

Kav in some crazy Seattle snow!!

Kav is coming down from Seattle to present “Better Together: Building Scalable Real Time Collaborative Apps with Node.js”. Here’s his description of the presentation:

If you’re not using node to build collaborative real time applications you might as well be using rails. In this talk we’ll discuss patterns and pitfalls of synchronous node apps. We’ll roll up our sleeves and dig into some code demonstrating patterns that can help you get started building highly interactive applications that sync real time state with Node.js, Socket.io, and Backbone.js. You will leave this talk with insight on how to build synchronous experiences into your applications and avoid some of the pitfalls we’ve suffered.

Kav Latiolais is a principal and co-founder at Liffft in Seattle and has been developing collaborative Node.js applications for the past year with Giant Thinkwell. He once built a horse racing app in 30 minutes on a bet. Before starting his love affair with Node.JS, Socket.IO, and CoffeeScript Kav was a Program Manager at Microsoft tasked with designing Visual Studio. Don’t tell his old coworkers he exclusively uses TextMate on his Air.

If you’d like to come and check out Kav’s Presentation and the other amazing 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!

Ward Cunningham Presenting at CyborgCamp. Photo: Mark Coleman http://markcolemanphoto.com/

I’m extremely happy to introduce Ward Cunningham. He’ll be presenting “Missing From the Beginning: The Federation of Wikis” at NodePDX. Here’s a description of what he’ll be presenting on in his words.

Our new wiki innovates three ways. It shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization.

The Smallest Federated Wiki project wants to be small in the “easy to learn powerful ideas” version of small. It wants to be a wiki so that strangers can meet and create works of value together. And it wants to be federated so that the burden of maintaining long-lasting content is shared among those who care.

Ward's Art Image, Click to Checkout His Site

Ward has a list of awesome insights and projects he’s worked on, including a little agile manifesto contribution.  Here’s a short bio of Ward,

Ward Cunningham currently serves in a one-year appointment as Nike’s open-data fellow. He has been CTO at CitizenGlobal, a growth company enabling the co-creation of media. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has served as CTO of AboutUs, a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.

Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the AgileManifesto.org. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences which continues to be held all over the word.

• Videos: http://wardcunningham.github.com
• Github: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki

If you’d like to come and check out Ward’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! 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 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 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.

• Company: http://mongohq.com
• Github: http://github.com/coderoshi
• Twitter: @coderoshi
• Book: http://sevenweeks.org

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.