Monday, September 28, 2015

Week in Philly Tech 2015/09/28

RedLine13 Newsletter 1.0 


I was a day delayed putting out Next Week In Philly Tech because I was building the first newsletter for RedLine13.   I have read quite a few marketing books including "Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers" by local entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg and co-author Justin Mares.  While those books have been good, shedding light on the tactics and strategies, they don't always cover time investment and time expectations.

When sharing my thoughts recently with a marketing pro, their response
LOL! Marketing is a lot of work - which is mostly invisible to everyone else!
Then followed by detailed experiences and pitfalls that I appreciated immensely.  As a developer-for-life putting time into marketing is a big change.  I am not sure the following is the most important lesson in marketing, but definitely important for me during this transition.

Software development has an inherent pleasure response - code in, results out, yay.  Marketing is more like planting seeds, watering your plants every day, and one day seeing it just poke out of the dirt.  Exclaim victory but then realize you have so much more to go.   Marketing takes patience, immense investments in time and details while setting personal expectations for one not to get ahead of them self.  All this while no one else really notices.


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Monday September 28th

Bucks County Women In Tech
Location @ AWeber
We will hear more in depth from 3 WITs about their careers:  
Mali Patel, QA Manager @ LeadiD 
Michele Kopach, Radiologist @ Doylestown Radiology Assoc. 
Amber Heilman, Software Engineer @ AWeber

Tuesday September 29th

Software As A Craft
Location @ PromptWorks : 1211 Chestnut Street Suite 400, Philadelphia, PA 
For September's meeting, we'll focus on the craftsman/apprentice relationship, with A. Jesse Jiryu Davis talking about concrete steps you can take to be an effective mentor.

Linode
Location @ Industrious : 230 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA
Jeremiah is a Technical Solutions Engineer for Puppet Labs.  He is a long time Linux user and most recently has focused on bringing automation solutions into heterogeneous IT environments.

6:30pm Being responsible for engineering quality with Grant Ammons
Bucks County Tech
Location @ MeetMe 100 Union Square Drive, New Hope, PA
In this talk, Grant Ammons focus on how "QA" has turned into a loaded word. Engineering leaders should be wary of creating departments where a "wall" can exist, that the work of quality can be thrown over.

Wednesday September 30th

6:00pm September JavaScript meetup
Philadelphia JavaScript Developers
Location @ Quorum at the Science Center : 3711 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
How can headless, automated tests be run in continuous integration against technologies that require a real GUI web browser?

6:00pm Android Lightning Talks
Android Alliance
Location @ Comcast Center : 1701 John F. Kennedy Blvd, Philadelphia, PA
This month we are going to have short talks on a variety of topics.

6:30pm NJ Tech Meetup Don Katz CEO Audible
NJ Tech MeetUp
Location @ Audible Inc. : 1 Washington Place, Newark, NJ
Fireside Chat With Don Katz

Thursday October 1st

5:00pm NumPy Creator Travis Oliphant
Philadelphia Python Users Group
Location @ Susquehanna 401 City Avenue, Bala Cynwyd, PA
He will be giving a talk discussing the continuing expansion of the Python community, industry trends, and Continuum Analytics’ role in shaping the future.

6:00pm Code For Philly Workshop #152
Code For Philly
Location @ Devnuts 908 North 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA
Join us at our weekly workshop to learn about technology, sharpen your skills, and help Philly at the same time! 

6:30pm Ways to build an automation team
Automated Testing Philadelphia
Location @ PromptWorks : 1211 Chestnut Street Suite 400, Philadelphia, PA
One of the hardest parts of bringing automation to an organization can be simply getting started. How do you find the right people? How do you train your current people? Luckily, we have some answers for you! Bob Hefele from CoreDial and John Klose from Swift will each speak about their experiences and challenges in building a QA team focused around automation.

Friday October 2nd

Code For Philly
Location @ Liberty Lands Park - N.3rd St, Poplar St - 
This year N3rd Street officially turns one year old and Code for Philly (as well as many others) are helping celebrate. Check out the website for a comprehensive list of participants: http://n3rd.st

Wednesday October 7th

Big Data Developers in Philadelphia
Location @ IBM Office, Philadelphia, PA

Thursday October8th

Tech & GeoPhilly
Location @ Quorum at the Science Center : 3711 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Philadelphia's third annual LocationTech event is an evening speaker series featuring technical talks on the convergence of open source and geospatial. This is presented by GeoPhilly and hosted by Azavea.  This event follows the JS.Geo conference in Philadelphia and is conveniently located in the same venue. 







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Monday, September 21, 2015

Next Week in Philly Tech 2015/09/21

Automating for +20 Years

Last week I presented at Tech In Motion Philadephia on Evolution in Automation.  It was a 15-minute presentation slot and my talk was a bit of bridge between Open Source Automation and my specialty in Load Testing.

- Open Source makes automation possible.
- Then proposing a future direction in Automation - From CI to Continuous Automation
- And then integrate my niche of automation - Load Testing.

Truth is Open Source made automation possible for all corners of the engineering organization, but engineers have been automating since day one.

Over 20 years ago I was asked a question - Can you make these? 





And a family business was created.   However,  a few weeks on a band-saw in my garage in the winter was enough to get us thinking - how can we automate this process?  While this was all pre-internet, 3d-printers, and laser-cutters we somehow found 3d-axis machines that were humanly affordable and only programmable in assembly. 

Twenty years later those machines are still in the family though we have moved on from the business.  For me, it was the beginning of learning how to build systematic and automatic systems to make the complicated easy. 


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Monday September 21st  

6:00pm Major League Sports & Tech
Philly New Tech MeetUp
Location @ The Hub Cira Center : 2929 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA
We are teaming up with Mobile Monday to host a fantastic sports-themed event that highlights what our local sports teams are doing with mobile technologies to enhance the fan experience and team operations. 

Tuesday September 22nd

8:00am Tech Breakfast  [EventUpon]
Philadelphia TechBreakfast
Location @ LeBow College : 3220 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA

  1. Akili Software, Inc.: Savii Care - Michelle Harper
  2. The World Social Reserve System: - Ronald Williams
  3. TeleStax: Restcomm - Ivelin Ivanov
  4. Rain Everywhere: Rewind - Phil IVes

It may be Pope week in Philly, but we're holding our first Philly PostgreSQL Night on September 22. Unlike our traditional Meetup format, we are extending it to 2 talks for the evening with a sponsored happy hour to follow. 
  • Postgres(QL) in 10
  • Debugging Your PL/pgSQL Code

Wednesday September 23rd

5:30pm Anything C# can do F# can do better [EventUpon]
Philly.NET
Location @ Microsoft : 45 Liberty Blvd, Malvern, PA
Are you a C# developer and have ever wondered what the F# language can do? Or have you wondered if functional programming is really all it’s cracked up to be? 

Thursday September 24th

Avoiding Philadelphia? Head to North Jersey for Google Self-Driving Car Demo
5:00pm Self-Driving Car Demo
Google Developer Group
Location @ Bell Works : 101 Crawfords Corner Rd, Holmdel, NJ
Self-Driving Car Demo (hosted by NJ's own DriveAI guys)

Friday September 25th 

Staying home?  Learn something new for the day.
Take a look at RedLine13 and run a load test today.

Monday September 28th

Bucks County Women In Tech
Location @ AWeber
We will hear more in depth from 3 WITs about their careers:  
Mali Patel, QA Manager @ LeadiD 
Michele Kopach, Radiologist @ Doylestown Radiology Assoc. 
Amber Heilman, Software Engineer @ AWeber

Tuesday September 29th

Software As A Craft
Location @ PromptWorks : 1211 Chestnut Street Suite 400, Philadelphia, PA 
For September's meeting, we'll focus on the craftsman/apprentice relationship, with A. Jesse Jiryu Davis talking about concrete steps you can take to be an effective mentor.

Linode
Location @ Industrious
Jeremiah is a Technical Solutions Engineer for Puppet Labs.  He is a long time Linux user and most recently has focused on bringing automation solutions into heterogeneous IT environments.




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Sunday, September 13, 2015

Next Week in Philly Tech 2015/09/13

Always thinking about people

A day does not go by when I don't feel the impact of so many amazing people in my life.  When I joined JBoss there was an individual who led the Sales Engineering organization, actually he built it from scratch.  His name was Matthew Quinlan.  I admired Matt, not because of his technical skills but the fact he built a team of extremely smart individuals who worked hard together.   They were a team, they pushed each other to do better, to learn more, and at the end of the day care for each other.

Today is a celebration of Matt's life.  While he is no longer with us during the last two years he blogged about his journey http://mattquinlan.blogspot.com/.   The post that hit me the most was the gift.
Imagine for a moment that everyone you have ever impacted or influenced in your life were to reach out at once and tell you the effect you have had on their lives.
For anyone that ever met Matt this was obvious, of course, he had an impact on your life.  But it is very true that we don't often take the time to let people know this.   Today is a celebration of Matthew Quinlan whom I am very glad I had the chance to learn from.

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Monday September 14th  

Python Users Group Princeton
Location @ TigerLabs : 252 Nassau Street, 2nd floor, Princeton, NJ

Tuesday September 15th

Code For Philly 
Join us at our weekly workshop to learn about technology, sharpen your skills, and help Philly at the same time! There are ample opportunities for people with any skill set and experience level to have an impact.

Lehigh Valley Tech
Location @ Ben Franklin Tech Ventures : 116 Research Drive, Bethlehem, PA
Join us for an exciting night of presentations from three of the student led companies that just finished up Lehigh's Launch Bay C accelerator program.

6:30pm DevOps at Scale & Introduction to CoreOS
Philly DevOps
Location @ Comcast : 1701 John F Kennedy Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA
DevOps at Scale, Nathan Mische
An Introduction to CoreOS, Hector Castro

Wednesday September 16th

Docker Philadelphia
Location @ Wildbit : 225 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA
And it's back! Join members of the Docker community around the world for Docker Global Hack Day #3!

NJ Tech MeetUp
Location @ Howe Center Stevens Institute of Technology 
Kevin Ryan, Chairman and Founder - Gilt, MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola

6:30 pm Functional Data Structures in F# [EventUpon]
Philly F#
Location @ A2C Consulting : 1801 Market Street, Suite 2430, Philadelphia, PA
In this code/demo-centric discussion we will look at the issues involved and what F# brings to the table. We will also look at how to build facilities to measure performance and complexity so as to be able to compare and contrast alternative designs and approaches.

Thursday September 17th

Tech in Motion 
Location @ Quorum at the Science Center : 3711 Market Street, Floor 8, Philadelphia, PA
This night will be one for the tech professionals as we delve into the Software Development Evolution: Automation. 

OpenStack Philly 
Location @ Comcast Center : 1701 JFK Boulevard, 45th Floor, Room F, Philadelphia, PA
Welcome back from Summer! We will be having our first meetup of the Fall with three special guests from Arista Networks and Coho Data.

PhillyPUG
Location @ Huntsman Hall at The Wharton School : 3730 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA
Models form the backbone of most Django sites. They contain the fields and behaviors of the data your site is using. The proper planning and implementation of models is one of the first steps to creating powerful and reusable Django apps.

6:30pm Mike Harris Tracking Value from Business Case to Deployment [EventUpon]
Agile Philly
Location @ FrontLine : 1400 AtWater Drive, Malvern, Pa
Organizations need to stop keeping IT in the dark when it comes to the "value" of their initiatives. Or marketeers should acknowledge that they are ignorant or lazy about detailing them to IT. So how do we make IT become part of the ROI solution ?

Friday September 18th 

4pm Startup Hangout @ Clutch HQ [EventUpon]
StartUp Hangout
Location @ ClutchHQ : 201 South Maple Avenue, Ambler, PA 19002
We created Startup Hangout to bring amazing Philly startups closer together. We felt that, like other great tech cities, Philly deserved a deep sense of community and connection between its startups. Or, at the very least, we could hang out from time to time and have some fun.





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Monday, September 7, 2015

Next Week in Philly Tech 2015/09/07

Just say hi!


Last week, I had a meeting at La Colombe in Fishtown with Josh Detweiler CEO at @AppJaxx.  Figuring I would get some work done I went over a bit early.  The seating is open bench style.  I sat down next to a few folks talking, lo and behold they were talking a bit of tech.   As they finished up Josh had arrived.  Before Josh and I started to talk I decided to introduce myself, awkward perhaps but I really do have a passion for software and learning from others.   I am very glad I just said hi.   In his humbleness, this individual told us about his background, his Jiu-Jitsu studios, and the tech projects he has going on.  Great conversation and left it there.

Over the weekend in a strange coincidence showing up in my FB stream was a 'like' for a video - "The Road To Becoming a 6th Degree Gracie Black Belt at 39 Years Old" from an old friend about Phil Migliarese.  The person in the video, I could swear was the guy from the coffee shop.   I messaged my friend and Phil, turns out it is a small world.



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Tuesday September 8th

6:30pm - Using go and AppEngine to create a slackbot
GoLangPhilly
Location @ DramaFever : 1717 Arch Street, 6th Floor, Philadelphia, PA
Walkthrough of a go project using Google AppEngine and slack to create a bot that responds to commands.

6:30pm Node.js show and tell
Node.js Philly
Location @ Zivtech : 1315 Walnut St , Suite 1500, Philadelphia, PA
This is the second-Tuesday Philly node.js meetup group! We start things out informally and anyone that has something to share shows off what they've been doing with node.js.

6:45pm - Puppet Overview and Demo
NJ Systems Automation
Location @ Ibis Venue Center : 3525 Quakerbridge Rd, #903, Hamilton, NJ 08619
The talk will have a high level overview of Puppet Enterprise and a brief live demonstration. Puppet Enterprise is a comprehensive tool for managing the configuration of enterprise systems.

7:00pm - Intro 2D Modeling   [Found on EvenUpon]
The Hacktory
Location @ 3711 Market, Dept. of Making + Doing
2D drawing in Adobe Illustrator with a focus on designing for Lasercutter and Vinyl Cutter

7:00pm - Ansible Configuration Management
PLUG North
Location @ CoreDial : 751 Arbor Way Suite 150 Blue Bell, PA 19422
PLUG members are users of the Linux operating system and other Open Source software who live in the greater Philadelphia area and come together to share knowledge and learn from each other.

Wednesday September 9th 

7:00pm  NY Tech MeetUp
** NYC Event.
Throwing in this NYC event as it is a large gathering of tech and very light in our area.

6:45pm Measuring Satisfaction 
** NYC Event.  I have been impressed with the Pivotal Labs meet ups I have attended.
UX+Data
Location @ Pivotal Labs : 625 Avenue of Americas, 2nd Floor, New York, NY

Thursday September 10th

6:00pm Workship #149: Code for Philly - Duck Duck Go Mashup
Code for Philly
Location @ Innovation Lab : 1401 John F Kennedy Boulevard, 16th Floor, Philadelphia, PA
This week we'll be hacking on the Duck Duck Go and their "Instant Answers" feature to include Code for Philly projects. They're also our sponsors for this workshop:]

6:30pm Intro to Angular JS  (central new jersey)
NJDotNet
Location @ Infragistics : 2 Commerce Dr, Cranbury, NJ
AngularJS - you've seen it everywhere, but just what the heck is it? What's so great about it? Why would you choose to learn a whole new application framework when you already know and love jQuery (and/or KnockoutJS)?

6:30pm Spark Streaming
Philly Area Scala Enthusiasts
Location @ LeadId : 201 S. Maple Ave. Ste 150 , Ambler, PA
Brian Clapper will give an overview of Spark Streaming, complete with some demos and/or live coding.

6:30pm Small Talk (Taun Chapman) and Memory Use In Extensions (Conrad Kramer)
Philly Cocoa (iOS)
Location @ Apple Store : 1607 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Smalltalk - What it is and how it influenced Apple software development for the last 35 yrs., Taun Chapman
Memory Use in Extensions, Conrad Kramer - I will be talking about the little-known memory limits in extensions, and some common techniques you can use to decrease dirty memory usage.

7:00pm - Project Night at The Hacktory  [Found on EvenUpon]
The Hacktory
Location @ 3711 Market, Dept. of Making + Doing
Stop by and see what projects we're working on, or bring your own. All are welcome at this free event, formerly Open House/Open Hack.

Friday September 11th 


Saturday September 12th 

11:00am HTML 101 Build your own website 
Girl Develop It South Jersey
Location @ Rutgers Camden Technology Campus : 200 Federal St, Camden, NJ
This two-part Intro to HTML/CSS course runs on Saturday, September 12th and Sunday, September 13th from 11am to 4pm. Each day includes a 30-minute lunch break

12:30pm Unity game development for iOS
Philly CocoaHeads
Location @ PromptWorks : 1211 Chestnut Street Suite 400, Philadelphia, PA
Unity is an extremely popular game engine, particularly for small teams. The ability to produce games for almost every conceivable platform allows developers to move quickly and cover all their bases with a single project. If you haven’t worked with Unity before, this workshop will provide an overview of developing games in the Unity workflow, and introduce the basic concepts you need to get started on your own.

9:00pm Nightscape : A light and sound experience. 
Location @ Longwood Gardens
Longwood Gardens’ new nighttime installation will take guests on an immersive journey around the grounds.

Monday September 12th 
Tuesday September 13th 
Wednesday September 14th 
Thursday September 15th 
Friday September 16th 

Monday September 14th  

Python Users Group Princeton
Location @ TigerLabs : 252 Nassau Street, 2nd floor, Princeton, NJ

Tuesday September 15th

Code For Philly 
Join us at our weekly workshop to learn about technology, sharpen your skills, and help Philly at the same time! There are ample opportunities for people with any skill set and experience level to have an impact.

Lehigh Valley Tech
Location @ Ben Franklin Tech Ventures : 116 Research Drive, Bethlehem, PA
Join us for an exciting night of presentations from three of the student led companies that just finished up Lehigh's Launch Bay C accelerator program.

Wednesday September 16th

Docker Philadelphia
Location @ Wildbit : 225 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA
And it's back! Join members of the Docker community around the world for Docker Global Hack Day #3!

NJ Tech MeetUp
Location @ Howe Center Stevens Institute of Technology 
Kevin Ryan, Chairman and Founder - Gilt, MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola

Thursday September 17th

Tech in Motion 
Location @ Quorum at the Science Center : 3711 Market Street, Floor 8, Philadelphia, PA
This night will be one for the tech professionals as we delve into the Software Development Evolution: Automation. 

OpenStack Philly 
Location @ Comcast Center : 1701 JFK Boulevard, 45th Floor, Room F, Philadelphia, PA
Welcome back from Summer! We will be having our first meetup of the Fall with three special guests from Arista Networks and Coho Data.

PhillyPUG
Location @ Huntsman Hall at The Wharton School : 3730 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA
Models form the backbone of most Django sites. They contain the fields and behaviors of the data your site is using. The proper planning and implementation of models is one of the first steps to creating powerful and reusable Django apps.

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