BarCamp Buffalo #4

BarCamp Buffalo #4 was on December 14th. The vast majority of the 12 talks given were business and marketing related falling in line with the theme of the night; entrepreneurship and startups. I spoke generally about my experiences writing a multi-threaded daemon in perl and specifically about Proc::PID::File not being thread-safe. The fix for that is now out on the CPAN and all is well. You can view my slides here.

Links and Notes for 2009-11-25

• [GO] YouTube - Buzzing the Tower in the NASA Shuttle Simulator
  The Space Shuttle Simulator is truly an awesome piece of technology.
• [GO] Infographic about Infographics | Hiten Shah's Tumblr
  
• [GO] Stevey's Blog Rants: Egomania Itself
  'Well, any time you find a community whose overall Humor Level is rated at "Homeland Security", it's a pretty good indicator that you don't ever want to have to deal with them. Ever.'
• [GO] Living Life While Working Hard
  

Links and Notes for 2009-11-17

• [GO] Gabor hits Send: One Feature of Go that Every Programming Language Needs to Have
  

Links and Notes for 2009-11-16

• [GO] Woz Prank | Scott Rafer's Blog
  

Links and Notes for 2009-11-10

• [GO] My Field Trip To The Supreme Court
  
• [GO] Scott Rafer's Blog
  *So* angry.
• [GO] Scott Rafer's Blog
  

Links and Notes for 2009-11-08

• [GO] Indexed | Blog Archive | Too bad.
  Exactly.

Links and Notes for 2009-11-06

• [GO] A Rational Response to an Irrational Environment | UCOSP
  
• [GO] Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts - RMS, GPL, The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing
  
• [GO] memcache-top - Project Hosting on Google Code
  

Links and Notes for 2009-11-04

• [GO] Looking to the future with Cassandra
  
• [GO] Introducing Resque - GitHub
  
• [GO] Richard A. Muller's Website
  
• [GO] One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose Coupling - Continuations
  
• [GO] Chapter3: Luie
  A great essay by Richard A. Muller about his experience as Luis Alvarez's graduate student.

Links and Notes for 2009-10-26

• [GO] Beautiful Perl: A simple plugin system
  

Links and Notes for 2009-10-21

• [GO] From Novice to Adept: Cleaning Up Bad Code - Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog
  
• [GO] Re: git workflow (was Re: git?) - nntp.perl.org
  "Frankly if you havent used git before it will take some unlearning, but eventually it will become clear. The fact is git is an extremely simple system. YET.... In the same way that Go is a very simple game as compared to Chess. There are far more possible Go games than there are Chess games. Same with git versus pretty well any other VC."
• [GO] djb (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  You know what? I am thrilled when my code helps *one* person through their day...
• [GO] hurl
  Cool. It's curl but in your browser.

Links and Notes for 2009-10-20

• [GO] NYC NoSQL Fall '09: Bryan Fink from Basho Technologies demonstrates the riak web-shaped data storage engine on Vimeo
  
• [GO] Jamis Broke Open Source!
  This has been a point of conversation over the last couple of days. If you are running a successful project then you need to identify a leader before you head out the door. Communities need leaders. That isn't anti-open source its just how humans work. At the very least most groups of people need someone to stand at the front of the mob and point in the right direction.
• [GO] Numbers Everyone Should Know | Everything is Data
  

Links to share for 2009-10-14

• [GO] John Graham-Cumming: Damn the torpedoes
  
• [GO] Post-Medium Publishing
  
• [GO] Nick Thompson’s first-person map | Infotropism
  I know now that they have this for cellphones but this has a whole bunch of data mashed together in a really cool way.
• [GO] Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future? - Large hardron collider - io9
  
• [GO] Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. "Hacking"
  

Interesting Links from my feeds - 2009-05-20

• Lessons Learned from Previous Employment
• Yow. This Is What Happens When You Are Big. And...
• A tweet from Randal
• Facebook, Hadoop, and Hive
• Google Tech Talk - jQuery
• The Screw-Me Scenario
• What Killed Smalltalk: My Balls
• The coder's bookshelf
• The Silver Lining - Excerpts from a panel discussion on entrepreneurship include discussions of why recessions provide disruptions that are good for startup companies and where government stimulus money fits in.

Interesting Links from my feeds - 2009-05-16

• To be (free) or not to be (free) - [In reference to the Ruby community] "In the age of git, anyone can fork anything - and the truth is that the real leaders are the people who got us on git, not the people who speak at conferences."
• The Variable in Work Life Balance
• Miniapp: Hacker Newspaper
• Marketing And Leaders
• Ten Things I Have Learned - "After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal."

Interesting Links from my feeds - 2009-04-29

• Invert Conway's Law
• Transparency is Bunk
• circos - visualizing the genome, among other things
• Ignite Show: Jonathan Kahan on Samurai Swords as Cutting Edge Technology
• What If We Were a World of Doers?
• The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown
• Post-It inventor watching Sticky Note Experiments video by Eepybird
• Narrow-minded Data Visualization
• Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores
• Gakudai Cabinet (Tokyo Cabinet): super hyper ultra database manager

Interesting Links from my feeds - 2009-04-09

• Iran’s Nuclear Future
• The Eight Levels of Programmers
• An Interview with Anders Hejlsberg: The Future of Computer Science
• Masterminds of Programming
• PDFMiner
• Why Perforce is more scalable than Git
• Understanding Git Conceptually
• git ready

Intersting Links from Hacker News - 2008-02-07

• Fall of the MS empire
• Add "pwn" before youtube in the url of any youtube video to download it
• The Economy According To Mint
• Memcached Tech Talk with Mark Zuckerberg
• Git - Intro to Rebase
• Augmented Reality - FLARToolKit Demo
• I am not saying that I am a genius but I fit almost all of this. I only disagree with the part about relationships. I am very happy and have not lost interest in mine. ;)
• Ceiling Height Can Affect How A Person Thinks, Feels And Acts
• CouchDB and Me

Intersting Links from Hacker News - 2008-01-28

• The power of small teams
• Apparently MochiKit has build in support for deferreds which I have only seen in the Twisted Python framework which is pretty sweet.
• Maatkit makes MySQL easier and safer to manage. This might suck or be super cool but it seemed interesting.
• Principal-agent problem
• Being more than programmers. (this yielded the link above)
• Consistency and availability in Amazon’s Dynamo
• Exchange vs Open Source
• Why Software Engineering Sucks
• Hack && Ship
• Teen goalie designs pads to trick shots
• It would be cool to have this for buffalo
• Crazy dashboard of now
• Why bad taste rules in business endeavors, and why that's a problem for creative industries.
• Innovate Like Chris Rock
• Hilarious
• Great info about the pilot that landed in the Hudson

Quote me on this:

There is a long and drawn out story that I was going to write about but I will let the reader create a story around my quote.

A technologist is more than the sum of their potential documentation.

Goals for 2009

Dan posted his 2009 goals and I thought that I better get mine out there before it's February.

- Stop failing at blogging regularly.
- Get down to 200lbs from my current 268lbs.
- Read the rest of the O'Reilly perl books by the end of June.
- Learn Python in the second half of the year.
- Learn CouchDB.
- Be able to play 3 songs on my violin which I currently have no idea how to play.
- Read 30 other books. (This is my first books goal so I am starting low.)