Category Archives: Ann Arbor

Slashdot and its Michigan Connection

One of my pet projects over the last few years has been to try to rally the local Ann Arbor community to recognize that we really have a lot of cool stuff going on IN OUR BACK YARDS.  Interestingly enough, many of these cool things are NOT venture funded, will never "go public" and so somehow go unnoticed, even to longtime community members.

Slashdot is my favorite example, and I use it frequently.  What's striking is that even after a year or so of this (ranting), I never seem to run out of people who express amazement that Slashdot IS here.  In Washtenaw County.  Dexter, specifically.

Maybe IEEE Spectrum will change all of that?  This month (November 2007), IEEE published an article about Slashdot. OK, so perhaps IEEE members aren't really the mainstream, but it's great to see it in print.  Last month, I told some people over at SPARK about the Slashdot 10th anniversary party (it was held at Leopold Brothers, and I hear that a good time was had by all … over 200 people signed up to attend).  It's really too bad that the local media has no apparent interest in such good news.  Seriously, when was the last time, you saw any good news in the Ann Arbor Business section?   It's not that the good news isn't here; it somehow just doesn't get published (sigh).

And no, Slashdot isn't the only Ann Arbor area success story.  There are many businesses that are quite successful, from small spinoffs from the University of Michigan to small companies started by people who came here and decided that they wanted to stay.  It's not just limited to software companies either.  For grins, look at ultrafast lasers and optics in general.  Ann Arbor is a hub for development in this research area by many companies.  Want an example?  Picometrix is a great example.  Not only did they start here, but they were recently purchased by a large company in CA (Advanced Photonix) and brought the headquarters to Ann Arbor.  Clark-MXR, Coherix, Michigan Aerospace, General Dynamics, Dexter Research, Ann Arbor Sensor Systems, Optimetrics, Kaiser, and K-Space are more examples. 

And I know that I'm only scratching the surface here.  So what's the point?  The point is that there's cool stuff here and I think we're all better off knowing that.

Mike Finney, president of SPARK, has recently started a blog with MetroMode Magazine.  He's been commending people for "doing something right".  I'm glad that he's doing this.  I don't think that he's actively searching out lists of cool companies (like above), but rather rewarding people for doing something right recently, and that's fine too. I think that all of us should keep ranting promoting the community even to others in this community.  If we don't know what cool things are here, we certainly can't expect others to see how cool we are.  Ann Arbor is a thriving community in a state that is suffering some bad economic times. Let's continue to present the good news that comes out of this area, not only the bad.

 

MichiPUG tonight, Lightning Friday, and Leopard Wednesday …

The Michigan Python User Group is meeting here tonight.  The meeting will be a Python free-for-all, which should be a lot of fun.  

Lightning Talk Fridays contine tomorrow (November 2), from 3-5.  Come with a topic or just your interest.

Wednesday November 7 is the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting, and John Hickey from Apple will be here to discuss Leopard.

All of the above events are being held at the SRT offices, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor (corner of Fifth and Washington, entrance from Fifth).  Take the elevator to 2R or wind around to the left from the stairwell.
 

P.S. And if you're not interested in Leopard, then there's an interesting non-computer related talk going on in Ypsilanti at the Corner Brewery regarding Solar Power and Optics, on Wednesday November 7, from 7-9!
 

Lightning talks again this Friday

To avoid Thanksgiving week and some other conflicts, we "resequenced" the lightning talks for Novermber. We're doing another set of lightning talks this Friday, November 2, from 3-5 pm (and then the 16th and 30th as well).  We hope that we will have as much fun this week as we have in the previous two weeks.  

Last week, we had talks ranging from a Simple English parser to Boo  BoxerP to Braille and how it relates to computer codes. We also saw a code compare collaboration for a simple web app, comparing ASP.NET and Java with Hibernate and GWT.  Visual Studio's tooling is quite impressive and we all learned a lot.  We also had an interesting talk on SQL Reporting Services.

Lightning talks are short (5-10 minute) talks, presented by any attendee, for the purpose of disseminating some information to the community.  We think it's a great way to end the work week, and we hope that you will join us.  As always, lightning talks are free and open to the public (both for attending and presenting).  If you want to make sure that you get on the schedule, post at http://srtsolutions.com/forums/32.aspx.  There's no absolute need to sign up ahead of time (most people haven't and our schedule has been packed from 3-5 anyhow), but we wanted to offer this as an option.

 

ArbCamp 2007 was awesome!

Today, I had the pleasure to attend ArbCamp, an Open Spaces event that was held in the Ann Arbor area (at Washtenaw Community College).  Over 100 people showed up.  This event was incredibly well organized and, as with all of the Open Spaces events I've attended to date, an amazing learning experience.  This time, I definitely talked myself into going. I wasn't sure I wanted to go … it was on a Saturday.  It's time away from my kids.  The topic of the event was "social networks and social media", so this a little outside of my area of interest as a developer, but heck.  It was an Open Spaces event.  I was confident that it would be cool and my husband encouraged me to go, that he and the kids would have a fun day without me (which they did at a cool indoor playground).

I'm SO glad that I went. As I've experienced in the past, it's hard to go to an open spaces event and NOT participate. Even when the topics are a bit outside of your interest, there's often SOMETHING that you would like to learn or experience or even contribute.  This experience was no exception.

SRT is considering providing some space for coworking (allowing people to use our space, toward the idea of building collaborations, camaraderie, and broadening communication in the Ann Arbor area).  We're running into a little pushback from our insurance company, who, to be comfortable with the idea, wants some cold hard cash. I had other questions that I wanted to ask so in spite of not having any answers, I convened (*) a session on Coworking: Opportunities and Challenges.  It was great.  I learned more about the way that people are coworking in Ann Arbor and elsewhere, and I got a lot of useful suggestions.  And the other participants learned that there is more interest in coworking in Ann Arbor than they thought.  I know about this: we've been getting inquiries.

 (* Convening a session means that you add it to the schedule and take responsibility for showing up at the prescribed time and location and get things started, then get out of the way.  And it's OK to convene a session about which you know nothing, toward the idea of getting answers!)

I went to several other sessions that others convened, including one on setting up a similar 1-day event for the ArborParent group.  That's an interesting idea. I also went to one on B2B networking, where I learned a lot of things and hopefully provided some insight to others about the local community as well. The largest session that I attended was "Social Networking 101", where the topic was nominally LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, etc., but the group moved in several directions, including the cool features of other software, about which I know NOTHING (but will likely learn).  Some examples include: Jaiku and Pownce and Yahoo! Mash (which is WAY cool, according to the 20-somethings in attendance). We also talked about privacy online and how we all balance that (there was a separate session about balancing work and personal information while blogging, but I didn't attend that one).

Late in the day,I convened a session on "Dynamics of Online Communities".  We talked about our experiences with flame wars, moderating, meeting people in real life (IRL), building trust, acknowledging the "Grand Unseen Audience" (thanks Larry!), hot topics, sock puppets (I didn't know previously that this was the term for people who create a secondary identity for the purposes of criticizing others in an online community without "endangering" their "real" online persona!).  Anyhow, it was an absolutely fascinating discussion, I thought.

Joseph Jaffe did a keynote at the end of the day (separate ticket, not necessary to pay for that to attend ArbCamp).  I didn't go.  The discussion sounded somewhat interesting but not interesting enough to me to miss dinner with my family and to encounter post Michigan football game traffic in Ann Arbor (100,000 people leaving the stadium all at the same time is definitely something to avoid!).   There was an after-event gathering at Arbor Brewing Company, which may still be going on as I type this from my kitchen table.

I hope that people continue to organize open spaces events in Ann Arbor.  I was warned by Bruce Eckel a few years ago that people often become spoiled by Open Spaces events and don't like to go back to traditional conferences.  This definitely happened in my case, and we're adding a more significant open spaces component to CodeMash this year.  As a member of the organizing committee, I would prefer to go 100% to open spaces, but we're not there yet (sigh). But today, with the speaker deadline past for CodeMash, I was at least happy to know that many of the very cool and interesting people who I met at ArbCamp will be welcome to speak at CodeMash, in the Open Spaces sessions!

 I'll stop writing now in spite of still feeling excited about my day, and encourage everyone to go to Open Spaces events, even when they only seem like they might be marginally relevant to your life.  When it comes right down to it, when you put interesting people in a room together and encourage them to TALK to one another, interesting things happen.  You, too, may be spoiled for traditional conferences.

Lightning Talks at SRT Tomorrow …

Don't forget to show up at our office (206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor) tomorrow!  Our series of Lightning Talks start tomorrow, and continue biweekly after that.  We'll start around 3 and go til around 5 or whenever people stop talking about cool stuff, whichever comes first (I do have to leave to get the kids at 5!).

I don't know yet who will come, but that's part of the interest.  Having experienced these in the past, all I can say is, I have high hopes for interesting content that is both informative and entertaining.

I haven't planned ahead much (it's a 10 minute lightning talk!), but I may demonstrate some of the rich interfaces that you can do in Java, such as those that can be found in the awesome book that recently came out by Chet Haase and Romain Guy: Filthy Rich Clients (I finally bought a copy last week).   Java does NOT have to equal ugly.  And tell me, have you EVER heard a better name for a book?

Bill has an interesting talk in his back pocket as well. I think it will be fun!  See you there? 

 

New Month, New User Group Meetings

It's the first of the month, do you know which user group meetings you're going to yet?  Here are some to choose from.

I believe that tonight is the Ruby MI user group meeting, but their website doesn't seem to be responding, so I can't check for sure.

You may recall that the Java User Group is moving its meeting to later in the month to avoid the first week, when so many meetings get our attention.  Keep an eye on their website for an announcement (and here, too).  Instead, hit High Tech Tuesday at SPARK, where Scott Johnston (product manager for JotSpot) will talk about the future of Google apps.  That event costs $25 for non-members and is held at Ann Arbor SPARK, 330 E. Liberty (lower level).  More information and registration at http://annarboritzone.org/eventlist.asp?EventID=1227.

Wednesday is the Ann Arbor Computer Society, where we will once again here a "non-Microsoft related talk".  For those of you who thought the group was Microsoft-centric, pay attention!  Now that there is a .NET developer group in Ann Arbor, many of the Microsoft talks are featured there and Jay Wren has been working hard to attract speakers from other languages, platforms, technologies.  This month (Wednesday) features "Experiences in  Wireless and Network Access Control @ Oakland University", by Chris Chamberlain of Oakland University.  November's talk is from John Hickey (of Apple) on the Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard release, what is new, what is old, and general mac desktop AND server things.  And December's talk is on Ubuntu Linux, the new release, what is new, what is old and general linux desktop things, presented by Kevin DuBois.  See, no Microsoft in sight!

Thursday's Michigan Python User Group (MichiPUG) meeting brings out Jay Wren, talking about the Boo programming language.  Boo, in case you don't know, is a statically typed language built with Python-like syntax (for .NET). 

The following Wednesday (October 10) is where you will find Microsoft content at the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer group meeting (AADND).  Martin Shoemaker is going to talk about "Dee Jay: A Voice-Controlled Juke Box for Windows Vista".  Sounds interesting, but that's NEXT week.

The Ann Arbor Computer Society, MichiPUG, and Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer Group meetings are all at SRT's offices.  That's at 206 S. Fifth Avenue, Suite 200.  It's at the corner of Fifth and Washington in downtown Ann Arbor, across the street from the Blue Nile and directly above the Linux Box.  Entrance is from Fifth, take elevator to 2R or stairs to floor 2. 

 

Ann Arbor, Google, and Recruiting

Last night, Google presented the second of two talks, this one for the Ann Arbor Java User Group. The topic of the Java talk was "End-to-End Clustering" and it was presented by Ashok Banerjee, a Noogler  (he's only been with Google for a month or so).  He is an Engineering manager who used to work for BEA on the WebLogic team.  Ashok did a great talk on how to balance load and make software fault tolerant and highly available. He has an easy speaking style, and I really liked how he kept the audience involved, periodically checking to see if people understood, reminding them that if they shook their heads up and down (yes), their neighbors would see, but if they shook them side-to-side (no), only he would see, and he would further explain the topic.  This led to a nicely interactive discussion with points clearly stated.  There was some active audience participation as well, which is always great to see.

Ashok promised to share his slides from the talk, and once those become available, I'll link to them.

As with Thursday's talk on Test Driven Development, this talk was held at the Google Ann Arbor office. I had really pushed to have the meeting at the Google office, as had Susan Loh, who was coordinating the event.  Not only did having it there make things easier for her to organize, but it also exposed the company a bit more to the local developers. I, personally, hadn't had an opportunity to get up to the Google office, and I suspect others were in the same situation.  It's interesting to have a view into Google culture (it made me smile to see 2 high chairs in the cafe, and I can only surmise that a few Googlers bring in their small children once in a while for lunch).

Google really wanted this to be a tech talk, not a recruiting push, and Susan was fairly low key in her recruiting efforts, mainly just leaving some cards on a table and telling people that they were there. But I had an opportunity to talk to her in detail about Google and the way that the company does hiring and I thought that that information might be of general use.  I hope that I will accurately portray this, and I hope that someone corrects me if I don't.

  • Google doesn't hire based on experience.  They are really interested in getting good minds. 
  • Google also doesn't hire for particular jobs.  That is, when you apply at Google, you indicate preferences for a team that you might want to work on, but the company decides if they want to hire you first, and THEN determines what you will be doing.  I both like and hate that .  I like it because I think it's really cool that Google emphasizing hiring the right people.  I hate it because I see interviewing as a two-way street, and not knowing what position you're hired for seems like it makes that part of the process quite one-sided.  I would like to see that explored a bit.
  • Google has recently stopped emphasizing location when they hire.  It's easy to see how they have perhaps saturated the market in the Bay Area, and have to look outside that area.  They have engineering offices in Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, Boulder, Atlanta, Seattle, New York, and Pittsburgh.  They have sales offices in nearly every large city, including both Ann Arbor and Detroit.  There has been a lot of speculation that they might open an engineering office in Ann Arbor.  My conversation with Susan Loh last night did nothing to dissuade me from thinking that was possible, but over the past week, I did get a slightly different impression about how that might actually happen.

Originally, I had thought that at some point in the future, there would be a huge announcement that Google was opening an engineering office in Ann Arbor, and that the governor would throw a big party, SPARK would get all excited, the Ann Arbor News would notice, and then the hiring would begin.  But, I don't think that's how it's going to happen.  I mentioned previously my thoughts that Google is testing the waters a bit, trying to see who's here, to determine if a pool of developers is available to support such an endeavor. I still think that is basically true, and that these tech talks were a perfect way to start that. But, what I had missed was the location transparency that Google is now employing in its hiring. Basically, if Google is hiring irrespective of where someone might actually sit, then it's fairly easy to bring employees into an existing sales office.

That means that there's the potential that Google MIGHT be interested, even now, in hiring software engineers for the Google Ann Arbor office.

Susan mentioned that she was impressed with the local community and its response to these events (60+ people for each of the 2 nights), and with the number of user groups and other organizations that are active in the area.  The audience was lively, interested, and engaged in the presentations. I know that's what they want to see.  However, several people at Google (both in person and on podcasts) have mentioned that cold, hard data is the best way to make things happen.  If Susan, Ashok, and Russell go back and say we seem interested in having an engineering office here, that's one thing, but a nice array of resumes piling up on Susan's desk provides that data that Googlers like to see.  So, if you want to let Google know that you're here, send Susan your resume.  You can send it to her at sloh AT google DOT com.  Susan didn't do a strong recruiting pitch, but I'll do one for her, and for Ann Arbor. Let Google know that Ann Arbor is chocked full of technical talent. It's in all of our best interests.
 

Russell Whitaker: Test Driven Development in Python: A Quick-start Approach (Review/Recap)

Russell Whitaker, a software engineer at Google came to town last Thursday, August 2, to do a tech talk for a special joint meeting of the Michigan Python User Group and Ann Arbor Computer Society.  While the topic mentioned Python, it was pretty generic and could/should be applied across all languages so I hope that people didn't stay away because Python was in the title. It sure didn't seem like people shied away from the talk; the turnout was great, probably about 60 people or so.  The meeting was held at the Google Ann Arbor office, so I don't know if some people were coming just to gawk, but I think most people were interested in the topic.

Test Driven Development is one of those blessed technologies that has been getting a lot of buzz in recent years.  What I find interesting is that everyone SEEMS to think that they know what it is and certainly some people do, but it's always refreshing to have a talk like Russell did on Thursday, where we don't assume that we're all doing it the same way. One subtlety that Russell stressed that I think is often overlooked is the emphasis on driven, that the goal is not only to test the software, but to drive development forward with the tests that you write.

Russell is a natural speaker.  He did an engaging talk, and even recruited an audience member (Jay Wren) to pair program with him. That was a little stroke of genius as well, in my opinion.  For those people who haven't had exposure to pair programming, I think that the demonstration was particularly effective.  It's important to see how interactive the process is, that it's not one person banging on the keyboard with another back-seat driving.  And, they did their ping-pong programming while sitting on bean bags, which was entertaining as well.

One comment I got after the talk was that part of the purpose of the talk seemed like a recruiting plug to attract Googlers. As one of the people who was in close communication with the organizers of Thursday's event from the beginning, I can really say that wasn't the objective.  The stated objective from the Google organizers was a technical talk, not a recruiting event.  So, I think that two things are in play here.  One, Googlers like where they work, and it really does come across when they talk.  And two, see my previous post. I really do think/hope that they may be checking out the local tech community to see if they can attract talent to staff an engineering office.  I 'm confident that they can. Google just needs to see it.  As an employer in the area, I will admit that it makes me a bit nervous, but raising the bar for creating good places to work is a GOOD thing, for all of us.

Russell's photos are at http://tinyurl.com/ywznsw

Winston Tsang (local Rubyist) also took photos: http://tinyurl.com/2mrh2x, including a few good ones of Russell and Jay pair-programming.

I'm always curious about how people find out about events, and so I asked.  Python user group was the biggest, AACS, AAJUG, Ruby group, and a2b3 were good conduits as well.  Others heard by word of mouth (including a few who read my blog, thanks guys).

Ruby, Java, and Castle! Oh my!

It's the first full week of the month, so lots o' user group meetings going on. 

There's a Ruby User Group meeting in Ann Arbor tonight, Monday August 6.  It's from 7:00-8:30 pm on the University of Michigan campus, 1670 CSE. Details at their website: http://rubymi.org

Tomorrow (Tuesday, August 7) is the second Google tech talk in Ann Arbor, this one for the Ann Arbor Java User Group.  It's being held at Google Ann Arbor, 201 S. Division (Floor 5), from 6-9 pm.  Registration (required) and more info at http://www.aajug.org/.  I'll definitely be there, since the talk is on enterprise level clustering solutions. 

Don't burn out before Wednesday (August 8).  Jay Wren (who I'm thrilled to say is the most recent addition to the SRT Solutions consultants!) is talking at the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer Group, on Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection, using Castle's Windsor IoC.  That meeting is being held at Ann Arbor SPARK, 330 E. Liberty (Lower Level), from 6-8:30 or so.  More info at http://www.aadnd.org.

 

 

 

Ann Arbor, Google, and Why You Should Submit Your Resume

Last night, Google, the Ann Arbor Computer Society and the Michigan Python User Group met at Google Ann Arbor for a Tech Talk.  About 60 people showed up for the talk by Russell Whittaker  Whitaker (Google Software Engineer) on Test Driven Development, and were also treated to appetizers and beer and wine.  Demand was high for the free event, with registration filling up quickly and those who weren't able to sign up ahead of time were active in their attempts to figure out how to get in (showing up at the door didn't work, trying to take someone else's place didn't work either; Google checks photo ids).

I'll write more about the talk itself later, but I have some ideas about what was happening here that I want to express.  I want to talk about what Google's plans are for an engineering office in Ann Arbor. Isn't that really what all of us want to know?  Are they going to do one, and when?

First of all, Google is an engineering-driven company.  In many cases, they have set up satellite sales offices only to follow with engineering offices later. Google Ann Arbor is the AdWords headquarters, so there is a lot of speculation and hope that an engineering office will follow.  But, in order to set up an engineering office, they need to know that they can attract talent in the area and to the area. The first step toward that, in my opinion, is to see who's here. 

Last night's meeting was a good indication that we have a vibrant tech community, full of people who are passionate about software development, people who would make great Google employees.  There's another meeting on Tuesday, August 7 at the Google Ann Arbor office.  That meeting is on end-to-end clustering.  Not only is that an interesting topic, it's also an opportunity for the Ann Arbor tech community to get together and to demonstrate our passion for software, both to one another and to Google.

So, if you want a Google engineering office in Ann Arbor, let Google know that you're here. If the Ann Arbor community sends resumes of highly qualified people, I think that they will come.  Work with Susan Loh (sloh AT google DOT com), who is a UM grad and is in town for the talks all week.  Get her your resume.

In the meantime, see you Tuesday?  Registration for that event is at http://services.google.com/events/annarbor_techtalk07_2.  Seating is limited and preregistration is required.  Don't miss out.

P.S. Even the local community needs to know "who's here".  I know that I met new people last night: people from Zattoo, a tv-to-internet startup here in Ann Arbor, and people from the Ruby user group, as well as some guys starting up a local Ubuntu LoCo team.  I hope that I can encourage everyone in the local community to go to user group meetings and become involved.  Jay Wren, the Ann Arbor Computer Society program chair, has been soliciting talks from the different groups in order to expose the diversity that we have in our user groups.  We need to learn from one another, and we need to know who's here.