Aug 05
Big ups to Derek Neighbors for pulling together the first ever Phoenix Dev House last night and hosting it at his place. It was a 12-hr hack session modeled after the first one conducted in SF. The idea is to get a bunch of coders together in a room and kick around ideas and then act on them, cranking out some code and getting something tangible finished by the end of the evening. At the first Super Happy Dev House they ended up writing the wiki system that was used to collaborate on future events (apparently Derek used this as well for the Phx site).
There were some great demos- Brian Shaler showed off a couple projects he’s been working on including an offline tool for digg users which he plans to unveil shortly and his crappy graphs site. This is the guy who figured out the secret of getting massive diggs for his stuff – write flash-based visualization tools for digg users. Josh Knowles showed off an app he made for the iPhone that allows him to control a keynote presentation on his mac from his iPhone – very cool. He’s also working on an app for the iPhone that’s similar to the Feelrz idea I submitted to Cambrian House. If he pulls that one off it has the potential to become absolute craze like Twitter. David Koontz showed off something he’s doing with JRuby but honestly he lost me at “J” :-( Lorin Thwaits demo’d a pet project of his that makes it easy to find very large prime numbers. I still don’t fully understand the utility of this but apparently the problem is important enough that the EFF is giving away $100,000 to the person that finds the next big one. You’ll probably see Lorin on the Discovery channel next month… James Britt was able to get some insight that helped him solve a Google Gears problem. I showed off the Sentinel application I had written a few years ago to solve the issue for people who transact business internationally of maintaining compliance with the OFAC’s SDN list. There were other demos but I had to leave early. But not before demo’ing a bomb-ass guacamole recipe (see picture).
If you’re a nerd in Phoenix you’ll want to do a couple things if you haven’t already:
Sign up for the next Desert Code Camp happening on September 15th at UAT. Ideally, sign up to give a talk and not just attend.
Join the Elev8AZ google group and help boost visibility of tech in AZ by keeping up with announcements and promo opportunities that can get local AZ people and companies noticed
This week begins the voting on SXSW panels. We’ve got handful of AZ people that have submitted talk proposals so be sure to vote for your local favorites.
If you haven’t yet been to a Refresh Phoenix event come out this Tuesday and meet other nerds doing cool stuff in AZ.
And look for another Barcamp in the early December time range. You can monitor the RSS on that page to stay updated.
These events generate real ideas, relationships and even businesses. Thanks again to Derek for putting it together. If you’re in Phoenix and complaining that there’s nothing happening in the tech scene, there’s no excuse not to be at one of these upcoming events.
Jun 08
We had the chance Tuesday night to demo the Trac JumpBox we just released to a small crowd at Refresh Phoenix. It was a decent showing with about forty people and six demos from local AZ companies that were all doing interesting things. The Trac JumpBox was well-received and a few developers who had set it up previously remarked that it would indeed save them days of tedious work. Erica Lucci did a fantastic summary of the demos and a few others have posted their thoughts. Thanks to Acme Photography for permission to republish the photo below. AZ is still relatively fragmented with pockets of smart people creating innovations in isolation. It’s great to see groups like Refresh bringing together the people that are working on interesting projects. The next demo night is scheduled for October. If you’re in the Phoenix Metro area and have something neat to show off, get in touch with Erica.
Mar 06
I spoke at the Refresh Phoenix meeting last night for an audience of about 25-30 people. We talked about the traditional paradigm of work in the corporate enviornment, the flaws associated with it and what Grid7 proposes to solve these. I posted my scratchpad outline for the talk here so you can skim the content. I taped it using the iPod and made the audio available below. The questions are a bit difficult to hear since we didn’t use microphones but all in all it seemed to be received well and generated a lot of discussion afterwards. Thanks to everyone who attended and asked questions. You can listen to the audio here.
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Nov 30
Big thanks to Rob Loy for the opportunity to present to his class tonight at Scottsdale Community College on the Mambo content management system. Mambo is an opensource CMS that rides ontop of PHP and MySQL and runs cross-platform. As promised, here is the powerpoint from tonight’s talk. There were some great questions asked tonight, some to which I could not give a solid answer. I’ll try and clarifiy some things below but if you have any questions regarding the framework itself or any of the other stuff we discussed tonight, feel free to use the comments section here as a forum.
To the gentleman that asked about which to choose going forward- Mambo or the new re-branded Joomla after further reading I would say it’s a safe bet that either will be supported but that I really like what I see on the Joomla Roadmap. They claim it’s not a true development fork but rather a simple re-branding of an existing product which is true, but they’re diverging codebases from this point and that’s the definition of a development fork so, call it whatever you want. I would say Mambo has a much larger base of existing sites but it looks like the inertia of the development community is behind Joomla and all the features of the latest Mambo release should be compatible so you don’t lose anything in terms of components and template designs. I would probably start a new project on Joomla rather than Mambo at this point.
Regarding the question about the recent security exploit I mentioned, apparently the official patch took a few days before it was posted but manual fixes to the code were immediately available in the forums the same day the problem was discovered (just meant you had to edit the PHP code by hand). Someone had asked about how to stay notified of security announcements and that link is here.
Lastly, to the woman with the animal shelter site and the question about how to turn off certain navigational elements on an index of content items- I know it can be done because I’ve done it on my sites but I’m not seeing the option at the moment. I’ll post a comment when I find it- it’s buried somewhere in one of the tabbed menus on like a section or category- i don’t remember which.
Anyhow, great questions tonight and it really was a pleasure getting to speak with the students in Rob’s class. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you have them- Mambo’s developer community is perhaps one of its strongest assets.
-sean
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