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  

6:30pm Python Web Security

Python Users Group Princeton

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

Tuesday September 15th

6:00pm Code For Philly Workshop #150 

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.

6:30pm LV Tech Meetup

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

6:00pm Docker Global Hackday #3

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!

6:30pm NJ Tech Meet Up 64 with Kevin Ryan (Hoboken, NJ)

NJ Tech MeetUp

Location @ Howe Center Stevens Institute of Technology 

Kevin Ryan, Chairman and Founder - Gilt, MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola

Thursday September 17th

6:00pm The Evolution of Automation 

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. 

6:00pm OpenStack with Arista Networks and Coho Data 

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.

6:30pm An overview of models in Django 

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.

Next Week in Philly Tech

As someone working a startup, every hour, day, and week is a trade off on what should be the top priority.  I have been taking a page from "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares with the 50% Rule. I am probably spending more than  50% on traction priorities but RedLine13 is in a good product state.

Typically on Sunday I do my personal review.

1. First a quick review of my previous week, typically giving myself a +1 or -1 if I hit the mark. This week was good and was able to keep working on the message around load testing over at https://www.redline13.com/blog/recent-posts/
2. Put together my weekly cheat sheet. Not posting a picture but if we bump into each other this week ask to take a peek, I am always looking for feedback to make it more efficient. 

One of the items in my review - checkout out local meet ups in the area over next 2 weeks. I try (try) to get to at least one meet up a week.  Why? Meet people, learn something new, and get out of the box.

Thought I would start publishing what I find going on within about 50 miles from Philly which is typically dev, ops, or perhaps startup related. I use meetup.com and eventupon.com to find my event listings. Sometimes I point out some NYC events if they matter to me.

Follow me on twitter or DM via twitter if you want on the mailing list.

Monday August 30th 

6:00pm - Code & Coffee Study Group
Girl Develop It
Location @ Blue Cadet : 1526 Frankford Ave, Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia, PA
Join us for our monthly Code & Coffee Study Group! Whether you're looking to keep practicing what you learned in your last class or are in the midst of a project, your community is here to help!

Tuesday September 1st 

 5:30pm - Dreamforce Preview 
Location @ Quorum at the Science Center : 3711 Market Street, Floor 8, Philadelphia, PA Dreamforce is almost here! Whether you can't go to dreamforce this year, already committed to attending too many sessions, or just won't have time for sessions at all, make sure you don't miss this preview of Dreamforce talks by PhillyForce members!
EventUpon

6:00pm - Code for Philly Workshop #148
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! There are ample opportunities for people with any skill set and experience level to have an impact. Check out our website for a list of active projects (http://codeforphilly.org) or just stop by and ask for a captain to help you get started.

Wednesday September 2nd

5:30pm - Python Project Night
Philadelphia Python Users Group
Location @ Wharton Computing : 3819 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Work on your own Python projects, get programming help, work through tutorials, help others, and hang out with Pythonistas. We'll share some resources to help new coders get started under the guidance of experienced programmers.

6:00pm MeteorJS Learn & Hack
Meteor Philadelphia
Location @ Three Logan Square : 1717 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA
For our next meetup let's get together and hack away. Bring a project or an idea, then we'll form groups and build with meteor!

Thursday September 3rd

7:00pm CSS Bonanza - Flexbox and Animations
Bucks County Front-End
Location @ AWeber : 1100 Manor Dr., Chalfont, PA
Sam Provenza - A New Way to Display: Understanding Flexbox for the Web
CF Grugan - Moving the Web

Tuesday September 8th

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 & Demo
NJ Systems Automation
Location @ Ibis Venue Center : 3525 Quakerbridge Road, Suite 903, Hamilton, NJ
The talk will have a high level overview of Puppet Enterprise and a brief live demonstration.

Wednesday September 9th

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 Duck Duck Go Mashup
Code for Philly
Location @ undefined at this time
This week we'll be hacking on the Duck Duck Go and their "Instant Answers" feature to include Code for Philly projects.

Saturday September 12th

12:30pm Unity game development for iOS
Philly CocoaHeads
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.

HACK, HAX, Internal Innovation

Running a hackathon is easy with teams that are passionate about products and committed to software development.  I posted on Stuzo Insights Blog about starting up HAX I at Stuzo.    

Not in the Stuzo blog

All of the years building software I am still passionate, still love what I do, and excited everyday with the possibilities of what can be built.  Running a hackathon serves a personal purpose as well, to discover all the passion from the people around me.  Like any great team it takes the energy of the team to want to improve  and discover new ideas.   The hackathon might not always produce products but it always starts those conversations and with a good team lifts the energy for everyone. 

  

Everyone Wants A Platform

It's no surprise I am a platform thinking person.  My experiences have been shaped by great mentors at RedHat, JBoss, and Bluestone. My college business scaled because I built a system for building personalized merchandise.   I posted "Everyone Wants A Platform" on the Stuzo blog to talk more about platforms specific to the business.

Not in the Stuzo blog
My strengths have never been to focus on the word platform but rather understand what we are building and why.  Getting to a platform is not a first objective, it has always been to first solve customer problems.   Building the platform always provided me two things (a) automating repetition  and (b) focus on building new things.

A Day in NYC: #AWSSummit and FB Mobile DevCon

I spent last Thursday (April 18th) attending the morning keynote at AWS Summit and then the afternoon hands on session at Facebook Mobile DevCon.   Posted about the experience on the Stuzo blog. 

Not in the Stuzo Blog. 
The night before I was at the Philly Java Users Conference with Sacha Labourey from CloudBees hearing him talk about Platform As A Service.  From my view the PaaS really extends AWS, getting to the point of continuous delivery and further removing obstacles for building software. 

Thirty Days Ago

I want to talk about my first thirty days at Stuzo, but first I think it is a good idea to do a retrospective on my time at MeetMe formerly QuePasa through the MyYearbook acquisition. I am very appreciative for the opportunity to have worked with a talented group of individuals and a management team that was able to grow from 10m to 46M in sales.

After learning more about the organization, and beginning my work there, I was able to focus on three attributes of building out an engineering team.

1. Passion - surround yourself with really passionate people. Find passionate, smart people who are willing to challenge each other. Love being around those folks! When my team looked back over time they would say, “ I would probably not have been hired if I interviewed today.”  My goal was to continually add smarter people. This works because the new folks constantly push others and that continued passion becomes viral. When I left, we regularly had an annual developer retreat, internal hackathons and folks that contributed back to the local community.

2. Commitment - to getting things done. In my first thirty days, I remember launching a solid social application for music / playlists using iMeem API (Matt K always did a great job building user interfaces). The MySpace /iMeem mess aside, I was blown away that we could launch this app, watch it take off with great visibility into the core metrics, and then instantly get mass user feedback.   After my first year, I looked back and realized that even though I worked at some great companies, I have never delivered that many services and applications so quickly and at scale. Fast forward four years, and year over year I was continually impressed. In just over the past year we merged (and stayed operationally focused), rebranded (and grew), launched in twelve languages (web and mobile), delivered many new features and releases for the iPhone and Android platforms. The team always had and still has the commitment to get things done.

3. Respect - for each other. When working in the same location and spending hours together, if you don't get along or respect each other there is not much room to hide. You will go through your day pretty disgusted. This is not a place where folks are going to stay. When you see that level of frustration, you must bring your team together to keep the organization working productively.  Respect helps people to have intelligent disagreements and continue make progress.   We had that respect as a group and coming in everyday was something I enjoyed. 

What could have I been better at?

1. Push changes to our process earlier. We moved recently into using KanBan but I did not experiment enough. We had a well defined process from day one and it worked but could have pushed harder.

2. Contributed earlier into the local technology community and make it more part of the way we were. It's not core to the business and not top priority but it does help with recruiting and retention, the key part to scaling an organization.

3. Removed myself from day to day management and at times focus strategically. I really did (and think the team often appreciated it) give a lot of myself.  This meant I spent less time being able to contribute to thinking strategically. I enjoy the creative and learning experiences you get from thinking deeper about the business model.

Retrospective over, looking forward while having enjoyed a great ride.

Gerrit Replication to Bitbucket or Bitbucket and Pull Requests

In the past I opted for larger development teams to use Gerrit as the code review tool.  Gerrit being a solid tool with low frills can be setup to manage reviews and define your process.   Gerrit replication while meant to provide scale through read only repositories, can also be used to sit in between review repository and deployment repository.   We are evaluating for use where Gerrit is for review and BitBucket is for deployment and browsing.  Modifying the diagram at Gerrit Quick Intro to illustrate a model we are considering describes the split between review and deployment.

I know there is Stash for better management and it looks good but Jira + Confluence + BitBucket + ...  keeps adding up.    Also we could stay the route with pull requests though in a previous life with even a small team pushing lots of code with branches the pull request interfaces were cumbersome.

I am still leaning towards the usage of Gerrit and taking advantage of the other great features in bitbucket likes its long list of services and direct support Jira and Jenkins.   However my friend  Brian suggests I take another dip back into pull request land.

What to do?