Portland Departure - Farewell Stumptown

Off I go on a plane from Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas, Nevada for the MIX 2010 Conference.  Before I even boarded the plane I met Paul Gomes a Senior Software Engineer and Andrew Saylor the Director of Business Development.  Both of these SoftSource Employees were en route to MIX themselves.  Being stoked to already be bumping into some top tier people, I bid them adieu and headed for my seat on the plane.

I boarded, and had before the boarding opted for an upgrade.  I have to advise that if you get a chance on Alaska to upgrade at the last minute, take it.  It is usually only about $50 bucks or so and the additional space makes working on the ole' laptop actually possible (even on my monstrous 17" laptop).  So take it from me, click that upgrade button and fork over that $50 bucks for anything over an hour flight, the comfort and ability to work is usually worth it!

Las Vegas Arrival - Welcome to Sin City

Got into Las Vegas and swung out of the airport.  I then, with my comrade Beth attempted to get Internet Access for the next 3 hours.  Las Vegas, is not the most friendly Internet Access town.  I will just say it, I am not sure why any Internet related company (ala Microsoft) would hold a conference here.  There are more than a dozen other cities that would be better.

But I digress, I did manage to get Internet Access after checking into the Circus Circus.  Don't ask why I ended up staying here, if you run into me in person, ask then because there is a whole story to it.

At this point I started checking out each session further on the MIX10 Site.  There are a number I deemed necessary to check out.  However, you'll have to read my pending entries to see which session I jumped into.

With this juncture in time reached, I got a ton of work to wrap up, some code to write and some sleep to get.  Until tomorrow, adieu.

The first Code Camp & Bar Camp, which is joining forces, was held tonight.  With representatives from Code Camp, Legion of Tech, and the SQL Group Organizers were all on hand to kick off the discussion.

One of the primary focus points was, should we have a two day or single day event?  It makes me wonder what would be better for a 800 person or so event.  Two days better, one day better?  Short days, longer days that run until 10pm?  What is your take on the matter?

More to come later, so keep an eye out for the Code, Bar, SQL Camp Event o' the year!

Week before Mardi Gras, the Saints rocked and won the Super Bowl, and @webtrends threw an awesome #wtengage Conference.  Props out to the long list of Webtrends People there;  @DashLavine, @caseycarey, @webtrendspeter, @justinogarrity, @sullybridgetb, @kaykas, @justinkistner, @michelewarther, @mrdiggles, @yodera, @vkenkal, @derekfine, @ekrobi, @mccook, @robinoula, @benfogarty, @noexg, @thomschoenborn, @mediachick, and others!  The event was awesome, great sessions, great knowledge transfer, great food, just great ? period!

Also must say the meetings, meets, and introductions were great.  I'm glad to have met dozens and dozens of people and get those names and faces connected.  Finally caught up with; @seanpower, @johnlovett, @christineconley, @ed1chandler, @bullfrogmedia, @ebeane, @cgrantski, @drcasio, @nadolski, and many others.  Then there are others I met and caught up with and still got more catching up to do; @aknecht and @bosilytics.

Seriously, all of these individuals are rock stars in the analytics community.  The conversations, new ideas, thoughts, and general kicking around New Orleans was a great time.  If you are interested in the next Webtrends Engage (and you ought to be if you do anything with analytics), check out the 2011 Conference coming to San Francisco.

Code Camp Kick Off

In other news, Code Camp is kicking off real soon.  Specifically, the kick off meeting is tonight here at Webtrends.  This year Code Camp is going to be pretty huge.  I am guessing at around 400-500 people, more sessions, more geeking & nerding about, it will be an awesome time for all.  So keep reading and I will be posting more tidbits about the upcoming Code Camp.

On Tuesday the 12th, from 6-8:30pm, make sure to get yourself to downtown Portland to the Webtrends Office.  Not only will you get to enjoy the awesome views from the 16th floor you'll be treated to awesome information from the upcoming speaker.  Who is the speaker?

Mike Downey is a Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft.  Mike was previously the Principal Evangelist for the Platform Business at Adobe Systems.  His primary focus was on Flash, Flex, and AIR.  Needless to say, the ensuing presentation and conversation should be quit interesting.

If you're interested, and you ought to be, check out the calagator event.

Last piece of advice, don?t drive, park at one of the transit centers and take the MAX downtown.  Life is exponentially simpler that way, and parking is then free and MAX only costs $2 bucks.

The SQL Users? Group met at the KOIN tower downtown in the Robert Half Consulting meeting space.  The material covered was based on the presentation titled ?Crossing the BI Chasm?.

Some of the key points in the presentation:

• You must become knowledgeable about the specific business.
• You must be able to speak at a 30k altitude all the way down to the technical nitty gritty.
• Maturity of reporting;  infancy (excel chaos, multiple truths, ad-hoc workarounds), adolescence (dynamic querying tools, etc), mature (scorcards, etc, KPIs)
• ClickTek (anti- data warehouse people because they can get right to the data other ways), DataMart, DataStore, Cubes...
• Maturity levels of culture - infancy (don't understand data, IT overloaded with unrelated work), adolescence (learning what is available, IT starts to know business), maturity (data savvy).

After the presentation there was 5 BI Professionals answering questions from the audience.  Questions ranged from how many people are in or would be in a BI project to who is the key person to manage a BI project.

The multiple roles answer depended highly on the project size, which is obvious.  However the simple idea of people being generalists, and stepping into the communication hat, the guru hat, and then the learning hat all within a short period of time.

The answers where thorough and informative, with audience and panel members participating.

One answer that came later in the panel discussion was something that I?ll just parallel with props for Agile.  One of the main ideas behind Agile is lots of communication, effective communication, based on learning.  Always learning, eating, breathing, and living the learning, never stop.  To learn, one must communicate and successful BI is not possible with effective and steady unending communication and learning.

Again, part of the rocking Portland technology event!  A great night.

Attended Cloud Camp PDX today.  Great overall conversation, with a lot of familiar faces & people of the Portland brain trust participating.

The conference started off with a large group gathering in the main cafeteria room.  There was an unpanel put together with a few cloud gurus.  After a round of questions the main sessions where laid out and everyone started out to the break out session.  Open session conference topics ranges from couchdb to cloud security, to the glorious tips and tricks of Amazon.  Overall a great bunch of discussions really breaking down what a cloud is and what a cloud does.

Overall a lot of fun, great food, and good people with great minds.  One has to love to Portland tech scene.  If there was ever a reason for a company to locate in Portland, this room full of talent discussing the bleeding edge of technology is a prime reason.

After that we all broke into second set sessions.  I went to the "Is Cloud Computing a return to the time share, maintenance model, and what does that mean?".  I have to say, I don't think it will ever be an honest return to truly dumb terminals and server focus, it will continue to be mixed.

That was it for me, being the host I had cleanup and such, so hope all had fun.  I had a blast as I tend to at nerd events.  All in all, a good day.

This post is great so I just had to throw a trackback into the fray.  If you want to know a thing or three about IPhone Development be sure to swing into Code Camp this weekend and check out that session or any one of the dozens and dozens of others that have been put together.

It's free, there is no reason not to come, and it rocks!  Plus I helped put it together so you know it'll be good!  ;)

So check out Rory's post and be sure to check out Code Camp this weekend. 

I arrived at the Fresh Pot on Hawthorne after attending the Bar Camp 2009 kick off day.  This is a good place to chill and code, think tech, or finish some work and blogs as I was doing.  I also was thoroughly testing out my Clear Wimax USB Device.  This was pivatol for me to do ASAP to be sure I wanted to keep the service or not.  So far I got disconnected once, which you can read about on my Transit Sleuth Blog.

We've covered a ton of ground this week at work in training.  I've learned a bit, am prepped for the new efforts I'm going to undertake, and am jumping back into taking care of some things that have gotten backed up since I've been in training this week.  I've gotten a dose of SQL Server 2008 Administration, and am happy with the changes over the previous versions, and got to review the Webtrends Visitor Intelligence, Score, and Warehouse Solutions.  I often forget, especially when doing development on a single part of the overall suite how many awesome tools Webtrends has.  There is really some powerful functionality in the technologies.

On that note I've finished up most things for the day and am jumping into some ASP.NET MVC work I've been doing.  Hopefully with more to be posted soon.  Right now I have been digging through various ways to do theming/skins.  One thing, is that the CSS, HTML, etc that can be produced with the ASP.NET MVC Framework is light years beyond the complete catastrophe that comes out of standard ASP.NET WebForms.  I've spent years designing, building architecture, and trying to compensate for its lackluster ability in that realm, but now with the new framework elements I feel like the .NET Framework has once again gotten back onto a solid and good path.  In the past the .NET Framework has always seemed more cohesive than any framework out there, but now it seems like it might regain that after losing it over the last year or two.  It?s a relief as I do like working with the tools and framework.

On other fronts, I will be digging into some prospective speaking engagements and am trying to figure out if I want to do some sessions (or A session) at code camp.  I definitely will be there, as I've been working with the organizing committee and been having fun doing so.  I also intend to attend at least a few of the sessions if I have time between volunteering.  Do you have a session that you could present?  If so get over to the site and sign up for a session!

Anyway... I'm done rambling on for now.  Got some things to write up for code camp and some code to get done.

Portland Code Camp is coming up on May 30th (with a prospective Friday afternoon get together and a possible Sunday event).  What exactly is code camp?  Per the Portland Code Camp Site, "Code Camp is a place for developers to come and learn from their peers. This FREE community driven event has become an international trend where peer groups of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines band together to bring content to the community."

We already have some great sessions coming up too including;  Dependency Injection: A Beginners Guide to Why Ninjas Are Awesome, Document-Based RESTful Databases (CouchDB), SOLID Principles in Practice and TDD/BDD, and Artistic Expression Through Code (Sure it sounds kinda weird, but I'll bet it'll rock!).  If you have a session you'd like to present check out the Sessions Page.

I hope to see many of you at the event, stay tuned for more information and make sure to check out the Portland Code Camp Site!

For my first tech related event of the new year I rode over to the east side via the TriMet #15 to Nemo Design.  Listed via Upcoming one can go check it out if they like.  There is a Demoliscious event every first Wednesday of every couple months (or quarter - I missed the part where frequency was stated).  To check out more browse over to PDX Web Innovators.

Open Lazlow presented by Dave

The Open Lazlow Project is based on standard markup for dialog with ECMA Compliant Javascript.  The javascript is then built into either a *.swf Flash file or a AJAX based HTML Code Markup.  Either way one ends up with a graphically pleasant user interface for building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

The project when built is hosted on a Tomcat Server, which I believe Java Servlet Code is what executes at this point to provide the actual application.

There are numerous widgets, or as many would call them, user controls available.  From the famous drop down to the complex standard data grid, the toolset is available.

One thing I did notice is that the framework, once built, is pretty compliant in a browser.  I would assume that it is about 1/3 to 1/2 as fast in IE however, since it executes Javascript so poorly compared to Safari.  I only mention that because Safari was used for the presentation, and it executes Javascript pretty fast (still, neither hold a candle to Google Chrome).

www.metroseeq.net by Kevin

Metroseeq is a search tool for anywhere.  You could be in London, England, Portland, Oregon, or Rapid City, South Dakota and this tool would work.  It utilizes reverse Geocode Lookup against the Google Maps API to find the nearest searched for item around a particular zone, custom travel path and respective zones, or between two stated zones.  A zone being an address, or better yet merely a zip code or physical area like a city such as "New Orleans, LA".

I really dug this tool and am surprised, knowing Kevin myself, that I had not looked at it more (I'm almost embarrassed, if I got embarrassed).

If you're ever in a city, I'd definitely give this tool a try.  You might find yourself using it instead of Google itself to find locations near you.  I know I'll be using it whenever I travel now, as it is kind of a pain to find coffee shops, particular food establishments, and other such places when I travel.

www.foodisms.com by Michael Kelly

Foodisms allow you to search for specific ingredients in Portland, OR and Tuscon, AR.  If you craze a particular ingredient or want to find a place that has something unique like Veal, check this site out.

I did however look up Gumbo, and unfortunately it reminded me that Portland is sorely lacking in Cajun Foods.  No real Gumbo, Etouffee, or Jambalaya.  It did find the last one, but the places that serve it suck - not worth the effort.  You want Jambalaya, you'll probably have to go all the way to New Orleans.  If New Orleans even has it anymore.

www.sunagocommunity.org - Scott

The Sunago Community Software was built single handedly by Scott on Ruby on Rails.  It is social networking software built primarily for the niche market of non-profits and charity groups.

I must say, for a single person working on it the platform is very feature complete.  There where a few exceptions that where thrown here and there, but overall a very nice software package!

mugasha -  ?  Sorry - missed the name, if you read this entry - lemme know!

Mugasha is a site that finds mostly techno that has come out very recently and lists the songs played in various podcasts.  If you ask me, it's a pretty nice site, even though I'm no big fan of electronic/techno music.

Overall, in summary, a great night and great presentations of the various demos.  I'd suggest the event to anyone interested in seeing what the tech community is up to here in Portland, or wherever any other Demoliscious takes place.