Tag Archives: Ann Arbor events

Ann Arbor Scala Enthusiasts welcomes Josh Suereth, of Typesafe

The new Ann Arbor Scala Enthusiasts group will kick off on January 16, 2013, at 6 pm, as planned. We’re thrilled that Josh Suereth, software developer for Typesafe and author of Scala in Depth, will be speaking at our inaugural meeting. Bruce Eckel, with whom I am co-authoring Atomic Scala, will be attending as well.

Josh will talk about “Functional programming patterns for the Asynchronous Web”:

Asynchronous programming is the latest hype for web development.  Why block a thread on a database query when the CPU could be looking at the next one?   While Asynchronous programming can help improve total throughput on a mult-core machine, the current state of the art lacks common patterns for how to define asynchronous flow.

This talk covers those patterns, from joining together a series of asynchronous operations to chaining a pipeline of asynchronous tasks.  We’ll present a few core abstractions from functional programming that help define asynchronous workflow.  Finally, using these same abstraction, we’ll show how to write unit tests that run synchronously using the same code as the asynchronous workflow.

This talk makes use of Scala 2.10.0’s new Futures and Promises API.

The meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. That’s at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington in downtown Ann Arbor. The nearest parking structures are 4th & Washington or Library Lane.

Please join us for this free meeting, open to the public, and contribute your ideas for future talks.

 

 

Events in Ann Arbor this week

Well, it's the first week of the month, so there are no shortage of user group meetings. 

Tonight, there's a meeting on Non-dilutive (that means free) finance for early stage startups.  The meeting starts at 7 pm at Blau Auditorium, UM Ross Business School.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday May 6, the Ann Arbor Computer Society will meet at SRT Solutions.  Who's speaking?  You are!  Lightning talks at AACS!  The meeting starts at 6 pm. 

On Thursday, May 7, the Michigan Python User Group will also meet at SRT.   Their topic is "non-relational databases".  This topic is not Python-specific, although many of the demos willlikely be in Python.  The databases: CouchDB, Mongo DB, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis, and Persevere.  More are welcome. The group meets at 7 pm.

And on Friday, SRT Solutions will hold lightning talks at 206 S. Fifth Avenue, Suite 200.  They start at 3:30 pm.

Tech events in Ann Arbor week of March 30

Well, I'm a bit late in getting this out, but the Internet User Experience Conference is ongoing at Washtenaw Community College.  It runs through Thursday, April 2.

On Wednesday April 1, Corey Haines will be speaking at the Ann Arbor Computer Society.  He'll talk about Software Craftsmanship, but I think that you will probably be able to entice him to talk a bit about how he's spent his past few months, on his Pair Programming Tour, as well.  I saw Corey last week at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Confernece.  He's an amazing speaker, and it will be a real treat to have him in town.  He's going to be hanging out at SRT on Thursday and Friday, pairing with our staff on various projects, so I'm really looking forward to his trip.

Also on Wednesday, at the UM Ross School of Business, you can hear Jason Mendelson, Managing Director of Foundry Group, a Boulder-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage information technology companies, speak on "Building an Entrepreneurial Community: Lessons from Boulder".  The meeting starts at 7 pm. 

Head directly from your choice of Wednesday evening events to theWeekly CoffeeHouseCoders, 9 PM at Mujo, in the Duderstadt Center (Media Union): http://coffeehousecoders.org

Thursday, April 2 is the monthly Michigan Python User Group meeting, at SRT Solutions, starting at 7 pm.  There will be some discussion of what happened at PyCon last week in Chicago.  And if that's not enough Python for you, the Ann Arbor .NET Developer group meeting next week, Wednesday April 8, features Darrell Hawley on IronPython.  That meeting starts at 6 pm.

This is an "off" week for SRT lightning talks, but there are plenty of other things going on Friday afternoon.  "Ask the VC: Live" with Jason Mendelson, Founder/MGP of Foundry Group. Jason says, "I'm going to plant my butt in a conference room on campus for a couple of hours and talk to anyone that wants to come by and chat, pitch me, talk about venture capital, etc.". Meet him between 3 – 5 PM at Lorch Hall (Economics Building) Room 171, 611 Tappan.

I'm hoping to head over to the Weekly M-Powered Entrepreneurship Hour, 3 PM at Stamps Auditorium: http://mpowered.umich.edu/index.php?n=Main.Courses.  I've been wanting to attend for a while.  I'm a huge fan of the Stanford Entprepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast and I'm thrilled that UM is doing something as well.  I'm really curious to experience it!  If only it were available in podcast form … it's WAY easier for me to listen at my leisure (while working out or while driving) than to break away from the office, but it would be interesting to attend in person as well.

Next week's quite busy as well.  In addition to the Wednesday April 8 Python talk at AADND, on Thursday April 9, Google Ann Arbor is hosting CloudCamp from 3-8 pm.

From the website: CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

CloudCamp is being organized by a2geeks.

 

Ann Arbor New Tech Meetup was a great event!

Last night, about 120 people converged upon Google Ann Arbor for a new, regular event that has emerged in Ann Arbor. Dug Song put together the Ann Arbor New Tech Meetup. Leaders from 5 Companies took the stage, spending 10 minutes however they wished to talk about their companies, products, etc.  This was NOT limited to software, although each of the companies had some software in their product.  The companies were:

Care Evolution provides secure Health Information Exchange solutions.  I liked how the speaker (Vik Kheterpal) described it as the Expedia of Health Care records.

Crowd Clarity is based on ideas from Wisdom of Crowds. They have an application that allows employees from organizations to "place bets" on which of their products will be a hit in the marketplace, and rank them. This feeds back to the company and can be used to project sales (and thus, target incentives for items that aren't selling well).

InstaTell Diagnostics is a UM spinoff that's commercializing the speeding up of diagnosing bacterial infections and improving on the more targeted use of antibiotics.

TheGenerationProject gives donors (in education) full control over how their funds are used. The founders are former educators from the Bronx, currently living in Ann Arbor.

URTURN is a Web2.0 project that pays you for activities that you already do on Facebook.  Rewards are paid in Uros (its own social currency). They also give away prizes.

StartupDrinks at Bar Louie followed the event, where conversations continued.

I'm already looking forward to the next event, which will be in a different format. March 26 will be Ann Arbor Tech Cocktail #1 at 7 pm.  TechNow 09 will be held April 23 in Royal Oak at the Royal Oak Music Theater.

These events are great for our area, showcasing what's going on! I'm thrilled that Dug, through a2geeks, has taken this on!

Upcoming tech events in Ann Arbor area

The Michigan Python User Group (MichiPUG) meeting is tonight at 7 pm, at SRT.  If you want to learn how to write a web framework using WSGI, this is the place to come.  Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears web framework) and Mark Ramm (maintainer for TurboGears 2) are both Ann Arborites and usually attend.

Tomorrow, Phil Wilmington of PeopleSoft will speak at the MPowered Entrepreneurship Hour on "Entrepreneurship in a Changing Technology Environment". This is held at the Stamps Auditorium, Walgreens Drama Center.

Next week:

At 6 pm on Monday February 9, the Ann Arbor New Tech February meetup will be held at the Google building in Ann Arbor (201 S. Division St, 3rd Floor).  Sign up at http://www.meetup.com/a2newtech/. 5 companies this month take the stage for 10 minutes each, 5 minutes to demo and 5 minutes to answer questions, followed by networking downstairs at Bar Louie. Space is limited, RSVP strictly required.

At the same time, across the street, the Flex/RIA group meets at SPARK Central, 330 E. Liberty, Lower Level, in Ann Arbor from 6-7:30 pm.

The Michigan!/usr/group meets on Tuesday from 6:30-9 at the Farmington Community Library, 32737 W. 12 Mile Rd, Farmington Hills, MI. George Castro is going to talk about microblogging.

The Ann Arbor .NET Developers group meets at SRT Solutions (206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200, Ann Arbor) from 6-8:30 pm.  Patrick Steele will be talking about ASP.NET MVC.

And on Thursday, January 12, the Michigan Flex User Group meets in East Lansing at MSU.

To close out the week, on Friday, January 13, SRT will hold its biweekly lightning talks, from 3:30-5. Join us for 5 minute sessions on tech topics. All are welcome to speak and/or listen!

Also, a group is forming to drive from Ann Arbor down to EdgeCase in Columbus for Merb and Rails 3.0 with Yehuda Katz. Contact Winston Tsang if you want to rideshare (not sure how much room is available).

Enjoy!

ArbCamp 2008 expanded! Registration still open 

ArbCamp 2008, to be held Thursday December 18, is still open for registration! It had sold out, but they were able to find a larger space and re-open registration. 

See the following note from the organizers:

After selling out in 3 short weeks, and facing the prospect of turning
away 100 waitlisted attendees, we've changed venues to accomodate
everyone!

Thanks to SPARK, we have a new location for ArbCamp on the edge of
campus - Cottage Inn at 512 E William St, Ann Arbor (just a few blocks
from the original SPARK location). Please join us this Thursday at 6
PM, and direct anybody else who might be interested in an evening of
intense speed geeking and community building to register for ArbCamp
08!

 http://a2geeks.org/display/geek/ArbCamp+08

Upcoming events in the Ann Arbor area

I missed posting about a lot of events in the past few weeks. It's unfortunate, because there were some great events, including Kirsten Schwark's talk on "Why Groovy" at the Detroit JUG this past Wednesday.

But, it's time to look forward. Today, SRT is hosting lightning talks from 3:30-5.  Held at our office at 206 S. Fifth, Suite 200, this event is open to the public and free.  We love it when other geeks come in and talk for 5 minutes about things that they're doing.  It keeps us all up to date!

Next week is a slow week, but there are some things coming up in December that look interesting and useful:

December 3: Eclipse DemoCamp, Compuware, 6 pm.  Free. There will be a presentation about building applications on top of the Eclipse OSGi framework, demos of products / plug-ins built on the framework and after the presentations, people will head over to the Detroit HardRock Cafe. The Detroit HardRock Cafe is located on the first floor of the Compuware building.  There will be plenty of free parking and security at Compuware.

The Ann Arbor Computer Society also meets on December 3 at 6 pm.  Topic is still TBD, but I hear rumors that people may try out parts of their CodeMash talks, to get input from the AACS audience.  That will probably be quite fun and interesting.  And of course, this is also free (pizza supplied by AACS). Meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200.

On Thursday, December 4, the Michigan Python User Group meets at 7 pm. The MichiPUG group negotiates its meeting topics in the week prior to the event on its google group, and they never disappoint.  Join them at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200. Their meeting is free as well.

On Thursday, December 18, ArbCamp resurfaces … as a BarCamp! You can read more about this event in detail at http://tinyurl.com/6eda4s. This article is not only about the ArbCamp event, but it's a great look at building and growing the tech community in Ann Arbor.  I think that this is going to be a fabulous event, and people will not want to leave.  It starts at 6 pm on the 18th (I'm trying to figure out how I can get there … have to figure out how to break it to my very understanding husband).

On Wednesday, December 10, the Ann Arbor .NET Development Group will host Jason Follas, speaking on Spatial Data 2008. The meeting will be at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200 at 6 pm.  Donations taken for pizza.  More details at http://aadnd.org. 

On Wednesday, December 17,  the Great Lakes Area .NET user group meets at 6 pm at Microsoft's office in Southfield, 1000 Town Center Drive, Suite 1930, Southfield, MI.  I'm not sure what the topic is, but keep an eye on http://migang.org

 And, don't forget to sign up for CodeMash (January 7-9 in Sandusky, OH). The early bird deadline is November 29! We have an amazing group of speakers lined up, including Mads Torgerson, Venkat Subramaniam, Jesse Liberty, Bill Wagner, David Laribee, Chris Adamson, Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, Andrew Glover, Ed Vielmetti and many many more. Whether you're looking for a talk on Ruby or Python, Silverlight or Multithreaded programming, User Experience or Continuous Integration, CodeMash has something for you. Wondering about Erlang? We have talks. IPhone development?  I'm VERY excited about this event.  

Castle ActiveRecord at AADND

It's the second Wednesday of the month (September 10) and THAT means, that it's time for the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer meeting.  Brian Genisio is speaking, and the topic is "Castle ActiveRecord — Don't Get Good at a CRUDy Job".


Here's his abstract:

One of the worst parts of a programmer's job is writing database CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) code. Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools help to eleviate much of this pain by mapping your objects to the database. The "Active Record" pattern takes it to the next level by requiring your objects to be responsible for persisting themselves. This talk will discuss the NHibernate and Castle ActiveRecord products for eliminating the CRUD in your code base. Topics included are testing, basic usage, comparisons of NHibernate vs ActiveRecord, queries, pros, cons and alternative approaches to minimize problems with the ActiveRecord approach.

The meeting starts at 6 pm, and is held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Avenue, Suite 200.  It's open to the public and free. Pizza will be ordered (pitch in if you're eating).

And don't forget that Friday September 12, we'll have Lightning Talks at SRT from 3:30-5. Learn something new in these 5 minute talks (or talk about something that interests you).  Everyone is welcome.

Titus Brown speaking at Michigan Python User Group tonight

Titus Brown is speaking at the Michigan Python User Group in Ann Arbor tonight.  Titus, who recently started his new job teaching at Michigan State, will speak about that job as well as his work with the Python Software Foundation (PSF).  I'm interested to hear how things are going at Michigan State, where they're using Python for introductory CS classes (instead of C++, which they previously used).  I've spoken to professors at other universities who haven't seemed interested in making the switch, and I'm curious to hear how MSU has accomplished it.  Has it been, as in many cases of technology adoption, driven by a strong advocate?  Committee?  Was there pushback from faculty?  Were there problems finding graduate students to help with those classes? Titus has blogged that the performance of students coming out of the new Python-based introductory class has not negatively impacted their performance in the follow-on class.  It will be interesting to follow this migration.

The meeting starts at 7 pm and will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200.  That's at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington, in downtown Ann Arbor. We're right above the Linux Box, entrance is from Fifth Ave.

I don't know if I'll be able to attend the meeting or not (my daughter had her first full day of kindergarten today and I've felt drawn back home from the moment I entrusted her care to the bus driver this morning).  Anyhow, I hope that someone will take good notes!

About Titus Brown:

Titus Brown runs the lab of Genomics, Evolution, and Development (GED) at Michigan State University.  He is also an assistant professor in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (MMG) at MSU.  Titus has spent his career considering how to build better computational analysis pipelines and tools for interacting with scientific data, and he has spent a great deal of time working on large scale genomic analysis frameworks. Titus is also the primary author of twill, a scripting language for Web browsing.

Upcoming technical events

In addition to a user group meeting this week, there are some weekend conferences/camps going on.  

Ann Arbor .NET developer group (Wednesday August 13 at 6 pm) features Jeff McWherter who will be speaking on applying automated testing to an existing application. AADND meets at SRT Solutions (206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor). Visit http://www.aadnd.org for more information.

eRubyCon is a conference geared toward the use of the Ruby programming language in the enterprise. The conference will be held August 15, 16, 17th in Polaris (near Columbus). The conference boasts speakers who have had success getting Ruby into some of the largest organizations, speaking on data warehousing, JRuby, testing legacy JEE code with JRuby, Ruby code generation, enterprise workflows and more. For more information, see http://eRubyCon.com.

BarCamp Grand Rapids is being held on Friday August 15 through Saturday August 16. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees, usually centered around technology topics. For more information, see http://barcampgr.org.

 And, of course, don't forget about SRT's hosted Lightning Talks on Friday August 15, from 3:30-5 pm.  Last time (on August 1), we had topics like Subversion 1.5 (Rick Harding). Phone Calling over Twitter (Ed Vielmetti), Selenium (Charlie Sears),  Cube Permissions (Phil Huhn), Generic Functions with Python (Mark Ramm), Subsonic (Phil Huhn), Blogging to Community Server from Microsoft Word (Charlie Sears), Musical Topology (Ed Vielmetti), and Blogging with Microsoft LiveWriter (Bill Wagner).

Plan ahead for next week too!  The Detroit Java User Group doesn't meet every month, but they're meeting on Wednesday, August 20, and the topic is Java Scripting Languages, with Kirsten Henderson.  And while it's called the Detroit Java User Group, it's really in Farmington Hills, so quite driveable from Ann Arbor.

[DMM: correction … there was an error in the post on the Detroit JUG.  Kirsten emailed me that they made a mistake in the year of the post and that was the talk she did LAST August.  Sigh, too bad.  I'm sorry I missed it last year and was looking forward to an update!]

I also thought that I would mention the Agile Summer Camp, coming up September 5-7 at Brighton Recreation Area. This is an interactive, participants-driven open spaces event that will be held over a weekend, and will attract professionals interested in improving software development through agile techniques. Some people will be camping (there are 2 cabins available, and a separate campground), while others will commute from their homes.