Tag Archives: lightning talks

Tech events in Ann Arbor this week

It's the first week of the month again … so there are user group meetings galore.

Wednesday, June 4 at 6:00 pm is the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting.  The topic is PostgreSQL 8.3 and Beyond.  PostgreSQL is a free and open source database.   The meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI.  AACS meetings are free and open to the public.  Supporting memberships of $20/year are available, which help to support the pizza and soft drinks served at meetings as well as the door prizes.  

On Thursday, June 5, the Michigan Python User Group will meet at SRT Solutions at 7:00 pm.  The topic is TBD but some ideas that have been thrown around include: Google App Engine, non-relational databases, and Jython.  I'm sure it will be an enjoyable meeting, as always.  It's a great group, very casual and welcoming (and the meeting is free).  Please join us.

And Friday is the "on" Friday for Lightning Talks at SRT. Head over to SRT at around 3:30 pm for 5 minute talks on any tech topic of your choosing.  We'll go until about 5 so stop by whenever you are free on Friday afternoon.  SRT's lightning talks are free and open to everyone in the community, both for speaking and listening.  We think that the entire community benefits when we all know what others are doing.

Ann Arbor area events this week: JRuby and lightning talks

On Tuesday April 22, Joe O'Brien, famed Ruby developer and Columbus area business owner, will be speaking at the Ann Arbor Java User Group.  He will be discussing JRuby, Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).  Sun is putting a lot of resources toward dynamic languages on the JVM.  First, they hired 2 JRuby developers.  Just recently, they hired 2 Jython developers.  Microsoft is similarly loading up, for IronPython and IronRuby.

Anyhow, come out on Tuesday and hear Joe talk about JRuby.  The meeting starts at 7:30 pm at Washtenaw Community College (room BE260), but come early for the networking at 7:00.  Pizza and soft drinks will be provided. 

 And, on Friday April 25, SRT is continuing with the bi-weekly lightning talks.  We're mixing up the format a bit, going to a more traditional lightning talk length of 5 minutes (we had previously allowed 10, but we've babied everyone long enough!).  Instead of starting at 3, we're going to start at 3:30.  But we have an open door policy, so if you break free at 4 and want to stop by, just DO!  This week, we'll have snacks.  It's Nate's last day of working as our intern.  We're sad that he's leaving, but we know that he will do GREAT in Manhattan.

Snow day: lightning talks canceled

We're canceling lightning talks for today.  The roads weren't too bad coming in, but I did get stuck trying to go up a hill (had to back down).

Working at a coffee shop this morning, I really appreciate having an office.  The light was dim, the chairs were uncomfortable, and the internet wasn't working (OK, so the MAIN problem is that the internet wasn't working).  I headed off to the library, where I knew I couldn't use my cell phone but I could at least send email, only to find that they don't open until noon on Fridays.  D'oh.  I had forgotten that.  So I slowly drove to the office and will leave early this afternoon, since sleet is in the forecast as well.
 

We'll see all of you in two weeks.

 

Lightning Talks tomorrow 2/1/08 … weather permitting

The weather forecast is for lots of snow, but if the forecast is wrong, then we'll have lightning talks.

Nate (our intern) is planning to talk about what he's learned about Google checkout.  I had him doing a research project for event registration.  He coded up a PHP script to manage it, and checked in the code.  I can't wait to hear his talk.

Chris is planning to talk about a project he did using XNA.

I don't know who else will be there, but I'll continue with another segment on Scala.  Bill will certainly do something.

Lightning talks are free and open to the public.  So if the weather is decent, we'll go from 3-5 pm.  See you there.

 

Lightning Talks Overview for 11/30/2007

We had a large crowd for lightning talks today (11 people is a good turnout). 

 
Bill Wagner talked about the Halloween problem.

Rick Harding talked about Google SketchUp and how he's using it for laying out his garage.

Bill Heitzeg talked about Javadoc Online and its Eclipse plugin.

Jay Wren talked about NUnit Forms.

I talked about some cool podcasts for staying current with technology (Java Posse, .NET Rocks, IT Conversations, Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders).

Mike Woelmer talked about RegistrationFree COM.

Phil Huhn talked about testing using Team Foundation Server.

We also had a talk on "Vote Early Vote Often" from She Who Will Not Be Named describing how her voter registration got screwed up and she was issued two valid voter registrations.  It highlighted how when there are multiple places where data can be input, duplicate data in databases may not be properly resolved.
 

 

I hope that you'll join us next time.  Because of the holidays, we will only have one set of lightning talks for December, and those will be December 14 from 3-5 pm.  Maybe I'll bring cookies and eggnog!

 

Football themed lightning talks at SRT this Friday

OK, it's that time of year again.  Michigan vs. Ohio State for the Big 10 Championship.  And the game is IN Ann Arbor this year, so, at the suggestion of one of our consultants (thanks Peggy!), we have decided to "theme" our lightning talks around football this week.  Yes, all talks are still welcomed, but be forewarned that SOME talks may have a football influence.

I, for example, was planning to do a Scala talk (which I still may do, if there is enough time in the schedule), but my primary talk will be the "little yellow line" (first down line). I LOVE LOVE LOVE the little yellow line. OK, that's all I had better say about that lest I not leave any material for my 5-10 minute talk!

Talks will be scheduled upon arrival and limited to 10 minutes.  Buckeyes, Wolverines, and even non-football fans are welcomed!

We will have some buffalo wings for sharing.  Please join us on Friday, November 16, from 3-5 pm at 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200.

 

Speaking at CodeMash

My talk has been accepted at CodeMash.  I'll be leading a discussion about Scala, which is combines functional and object-oriented programming and runs on the JVM.  Yes, the JVM is the Java Virtual Machine, but much like the CLR (which is the .NET platform), the JVM supports many different languages.  Scala is one of those languages (as is Groovy, Jython, JRuby, and many others).

I'll be previewing sections of my talk at our upcoming lightning talks. 

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.

 

More Lightning Talks!

Nearly 2 weeks ago, we started our lightning talks at SRT on a Friday afternoon.  About 10 people showed up and we had some entertaining and interesting talks, including one by Andrew Turner on geolocation and another from Mark Ramm comparing Javascript libraries.  Catherine Devlin showed up from Dayton was in town on other business and gave her talk on Microformats. Rick Harding talked about Zend Studio and PHP. Jay Wren talked about BoxerP.  It seems that a fun time was had by all.  I got email from several participants who said that they found the talks interesting and informative.

As promised, we're doing it again this week.  Bill Heitzeg has proposed a simple problem that people are invited to implement in their language of their choice.  It's a simple web app, which includes things that almost all web apps need.  It's simply a login page, that allows you to stay logged in for 7 days (or logout) and, once logged in, allows you to add name/value pairs, and display them at subsequent logins.  Bill's more detailed description is available here.  We're hoping people choose to implement this in the language of their choice so that we can compare implementations.

At one point, there was discussion of session cookies and such, but we decided that's an implementation detail.  Have at it.  Just do it in the language of your choice and demonstrate (fully complete) at this week's or a subsequent lightning talk.

 Regardless of your interest in playing along with this comparative collaboration, I hope that you'll join us on Friday at 3:00 pm at our office:206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200 in Ann Arbor.  You're welcome to present the topic of your choice (limit: 10 minute talks) or just listen.

Hope to see you Friday!