Speakers and More For Node PDX 2016
Spock and I are excited to announce our first set of speakers for Node PDX 2016, which you’ve seen slowly coming out each day! I hope you’re ready and have your tickets bought already. So far I’ve introduced Tomomi, Jon, and Liz. Today I’ll introduce Adam Ulvi a bit later.
We’ve also announced the Geek Train for Node PDX and the Node PDX Bike Ride. A little lagniappe if you will. ;)
A Foolish Quest Creating Knitting Patterns Using JavaScript by Liz Abinante
Liz Abinante lives in Portland, Oregon and works as a Senior Software Engineer at New Relic. She is infectiously enthusiastic about web development, teaching, learning, and feminism. She used to write JavaScript, then walked up to the wrong desk one day and now she writes some Java too. She enjoys speaking at conferences, knitting, sewing, and a hacking away on interesting problems. She swears she’s a lot more interesting than this bio makes her sound. She’s often been compared to cartoon characters due to her enormous personality and penchant for singing and/or dancing her way through life.
Isomorphic Business Logic (Or How to convince even the most die-hard C#/Java/Rails-on-the-Backend boss that you need to run a node server) Jonny Oropeza
Jon Oropeza is a full-stack engineer at HD Quote Center, a post-aquisition startup solving tricky ecommerce problems for their parent company, The Home Depot. Prior to that, he designed and developed software for the insurance industry with his partners at LifePro Financial Services, and also co-founded a deep learning / computer vision oriented startup called Tilt Video.
From Software to Hardware How Do I Track My Cat with JavaScript Tomomi Imura
I’m stoked to introduce Tomomi (@girlie_mac). Tomomi is an avid open web & open technology advocate and creative technologist, who had been active in the mobile space for past 8+ years. Now she is working at PubNub in San Francisco. When she is not at work, she still geeks around and hacks some stuff like Amazon Dash to Rickroll people.
Tomomi will be presenting “From Software to Hardware: How Do I Track My Cat with JavaScript“.
Dropping the Ball, GSD, and Staying Productive
[NOTE: This was actually written Thursday the 5th, things make more sense with that in mind.]
I sat here today, and several normal things happened that made me think of some seriously important things. The thoughts are presented very well by Scott Hanselman in a talk on scaling oneself. He’s got a lot of gems in this presentation (links and video below), which he’s given a few times. In those presentations he makes a few very quotable statements that I had pop into my mind.
Immutable Infrastructure - Some Reads and Clarification of What It Is
First let’s get these terms a little more defined with the help of some well written articles on the matter.
The Difficult Open Source Path
Bringing a closed source, or just simply an internally managed code base, into the wild of open source software can be an arduous and surreal process. In this article I’m going to ramble on about exactly that, with a few learned lessons and key successes I’ve had.
I’m currently helping the Home Depot Quote Center determine what is useful software to open source, and then helping them move toward open sourcing that software. In the past I’ve managed the open source development of .NET Extensions of Cloud Foundry, called Iron Foundry, which provided .NET support to the Cloud Foundry Platform. I’ve also helped organize and run open source efforts for plugins at New Relic, Basho, and a host of other smaller companies. Sometimes I’ve been a code contributor, sometimes I’m just interacting with contributors and managing pull requests. Either way it has been a lot of fun and every time it has been a seriously intense learning opportunity.
Quick Append to Text File with BASH
I commonly have the scenario where I want a bash script to throw in something at the tail end of the ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile script or just append some results like a log file to some existing text file. Well here are two super easy ways to add text to a text file.
Method one, using echo to append the text with the I/O redirection to the text file like this.
echo "line 1" >> greetings.txt
or even like this
echo "line 1
line 2
line 3" >> greetings.txt
Method two, using cat to read until EOT and redirect it to append to text file.
cat <<EOT >> greetings.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3
EOT
That’s it, easy peasy. Enjoy your shell hacking!
Today I'm Using a Mac
Today I’m using a Mac (since 2011, but inspired to write this today in 2016) not because I have some profound love for Apple (I don’t really) or miss Steve Jobs (he was a dick, but I bet I’d have gotten along with him) only because I don’t want to spend excess time messing with Windows headaches and the games I generally play over the last 7-8 years have been things like SimCity, Civ 5, and Cities: Skylines. All run perfectly fine on Mac w/ Steam. If I played 1st Person shooters I’d probably still have a Windows machine stashed in the corner for that…
…and…
…as for Macs, I converted solely because of what I saw a few key coders achieve in seconds over a Windows machine. I’ve not seen a single person come close to what these people could accomplish on a *nix based platform vs Windows. I switched, my headaches went away blagh blagh blagh (you know the ads, I sound like that) and then between OS-X & VMware Fusion I found I had a machine I could do everything from a coding perspective on (I initially bought an MBA). Then when I got the Retina Pro 15” I realized not only did I have every programming platform in existence available to me (even .NET!) I also realized it was the only machine of it’s size, weight, and horsepower that would let me edit in screen full frame 1080p or even 4k video without choking on itself. Windows didn’t even have a viable option on the market at the time (and really, it still doesn’t).
At this point I’ve given up trying to even use Windows to do work, primarily cuz it’s bad at video, bad at building code (most comparable machines just don’t build 1 to 1 code bases as fast), has weak POSIX compliance, Powershell is just a pain in the ass, it has poor SSH support (load 3rd party software? does it even internet) and security in general is completely bonkers, and Windows can never seem to find or maintain security integrity around any non-WINS/AD identified network (ok, in Windows defense, this is a Windows Server concern not Windows Desktop).
Beyond that even the OS-X UI is preferable to the sluggish, strange multi-tasking awkwardness of Windows 2010 (and it’s dramatically improved over 8/8.1, 7, Vista, XP, & 2000). The fact I can launch a program and it doesn’t kill process & memory resources while I’m doing something has always fascinated me vs. Windows, which seems to hand over every available resource to whatever is attempting to launch. What is that nonsense even? Let it launch on a lower priority thread or something. I could go on…
I’ve got plenty of complaints about OS-X, but it stays out of the way when I need to build code, automate infrastructure, sling dynamic code (re: Ruby, JavaScript, etc) and generally tears through Core CLR code & .NET Mono code dramatically better than sluggish old VS on a box with more resources then this MBP. Honestly, it’s kind of sad how it seems to magically do better then Windows hardware. There aren’t a whole lot of specific reasons except that Macs are usually just integrated (motherboard/RAM/Proc/Video) better than most of the other junk that gets released to market. Of course if someone wants pure horsepower, yeah, got buy a desktop and get 4x-20x what comes in the best Mac, then run Linux. You’ll get stupid amounts of performance to build and process stuff with that. But in the consumer based world, if you want the maximum options with the minimal amount of bullshit in your life, you go and buy a MBP and get on with life. I could go on…
I’m sure there’s a million other things where X device for Y niche is more perfect or perfectly acceptable, and I doubt I’d disagree, so go on, get yourself one of those. But again, for “the maximum options with the minimal amount of bullshit in your life, you go and buy a MBP and get on with life”. On that note, I’m off to sling some Core CLR code against a prospective Scala solution and test a micro-services idea of mine - using Docker and jazz on my OS-X box. I’ll be done in 20 minutes and will move on to probably a relaxing round of Cities: Skyline. ;)
Thanks for reading my partial rant /slash/ exploration of why I’ve ended up on Apple Hardware.
