Futureweb2010 Day 1
As is tradition, I will be blogging about my experience at the Futureweb2010 conference which is held here in Raleigh.
First off, Futureweb is a "lite" version of the real conference, so we don't get to hear all the normal talks, but we get to be present for the keynotes and a few other really interesting interview-style sessions. Here's what the first day of Futureweb2010 was like.
First off, I had no idea how big this conference (www2010) really was. It is a global conference with over 48 countries represented. Last year it was in Spain. Go Raleigh! Way to land one of those big, tech conferences!
This was my first experience in the new Raleigh Convention Center as well. It is really a very nice venue. Large, airy spaces with lots of natural light. A great place to hold such a prestigious conference. I was truly impressed by the venue.
The conference started with a keynote from Vint Cerf, who is one of the fathers of the internet. After being introduced by someone, who was introduced by someone else, who was introduced by yet another person, he finally hopped (although almost fell) on stage and the show started. His keynote was mostly focused on the challenges that the next generation of the internet will bring. Security, routing, infrastructure. Lots of things that, as a developer, I need, but don't really care about. It was an interesting talk though.
The next was a panel on the openness of government and the sharing of data. It was a panel with Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the internet) and a few other folks representing the UK government, US government and the US Archives. This is a topic that hits near and dear to my heart, as I work in state government. The focus was on making government more transparent by providing access to data that once was locked away in small, dark places. I found it incredibly interesting and inspiring. I immediately made the following tweet:
...which I plan on trying to make happen here at state.
The afternoon sessions were additional interviews with Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf. Both guys are very good speakers and extremely interesting (I mean, Vint Cerf just knows Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Who does that? Crazy...) Both of them are so far above the rest of us in their theory and understanding of the internet that it is intimidating. Crazy smart dudes.
A slight not to those who are organizing. Hour and a half sessions are way way way too long. In my opinion, one hour should be the max session time with 45 minutes being ideal. Those marathon sessions wore me out and I thought they could have been condensed with the same information conveyed.
Anyway, that's it for day one. I'll be around for the rest of the week so if you are attending, find me and say hello.
Futureweb 2010 at WWW2010
This week, I will be attending the Futureweb conference, which is a sub-conference of WWW2010...held right here in good ol' Raleigh. The topics are all set around looking forward to what the web will bring us in the coming years. Should be interesting...
There are some great speakers lined up like Vint Cert and Tim Berners-Lee. I'm probably more excited to spend some quality time networking and meeting other folks in the development community (my favorite part of any conference).
Anyone else going? If so, hit me up and we can grab a drink or something.
Come see me at TEK-X!
I have the great honor of speaking at TEK-X this year, which is an awesome PHP conference in Chicago from May 18 - 21.
My topic is "Lean Mean PHP Machine", where I will be talking about how Garrison and I do what we do with very little budget, high demand, high stress...but also high efficiency and quality. You know what that means right? It's gonna be flippin sweet 
But only if you guys show up!
Conferences are a great way to network with new people and revisit old friends, so I am really looking forward to it. It's worth every penny of the conference fee to hang out with the "Who's who" of the PHP community (that definitely doesn't include me, but it does include folks like Rob Allen, Matthew Weiere O'Phinney, Cal Evans, Keith Casey, Eli White and many more...all regulars in my Google Reader).
Come on out to TEK-X and please find me and introduce yourself. I always enjoy meeting new folks... See you in Chicago!
Open Source in Higher Ed – Give a Penny, Take a Penny
I love open source software. The sharing, the collaboration, the community around it. For those that know me, you know that is right down my alley. Working in higher education at NC State, there are many services that I know would not be possible without our access to open source software. Our campus homepage uses jQuery, we are a huge PHP shop, and MySQL provides database services for a lot of apps on campus. But open source is more about consuming, it's about contributing back.
I know you have all seen those little "Give a penny, take a penny" trays at convenience stores. There are a few pennies in there, and if you need one, you take it. But there is also an inference that if you have an extra penny, you should throw it in for someone else. Open source software is not really any different. I can't count how many open source solutions I have implemented, and without those solutions, I would have wasted valuable time and energy recreating something that was already done. Why not provide the code that I write for some other poor soul out there trying to solve the same problem? In my mind, that is just common decency, especially when my time is paid for by the tax payers of the State of North Carolina. If you work in public service and DON'T share your code, I may just call you selfish.
People really and truly appreciate the sharing of your code. As a perfect example, we have open sourced the code we created for the http://twitter.ncsu.edu site, making it free to download, implement, change, whatever. A few weeks after we released the code, I probably had messages from 5-7 other Universities who had downloaded the code and had plans to implement their own twitter site. Today, I got a message from one of those people that I had been helping over the past few months stating that they got their site up and going! Check out http://twitter.vanderbilt.edu! Then I also got this nice tweet from them:
I'm not saying that Vanderbilt couldn't have created this on their own. I'm sure they could have, but I'm sure they have better things to do than "re-invent the wheel". Now Vanderbilt's faculty, staff and students can benefit from the same code as NC State's, and that is a very powerful and meaningful thing.
Call this a plea. Call it a "call to action". But the fact is, if we are creating software at a public institution, we should be open sourcing it, no matter how big or small the codebase is. If you are creating software, realize the difference you can make for other developers by making your work freely available. Not only will it make you feel better, but it will probably make your code better because you won't want other people to see how you hacked some junk together.
The next time you download WordPress, or Drupal, or jQuery, or Linux, or Firefox, ask yourself what you have given back to the open source community.
Strategies for upgrading webapps?
Calling all software developers! Garrison and I need some help...
Here is the scenario. We have to maintain a bunch of production web applications, most of which use Zend Framework. When we have created a new version of the application, we need to deploy it to production in as simple of a way as possible. We have automated the file version of this by using Phing to export the tag out of SVN, copy old config files, set write permissions in the correct place, etc. However, the database manipulation has happened manually and we are looking for strategies on how to automate this.
We came up with an idea to write a custom migration library which will execute php and sql files, but it seems like a problem that has to be solved better by someone else. Anyone have any tips? Anecdotes? Strategies? Anything to help us get going in the right direction would be much appreciated. I'd even buy someone a beer or two 
Google Voice
A while back, I was looking for an alternative to Vonage. I use Vonage as basically a forwarding service, that sends a 919 (local to Raleigh) number to my 828 (local to Hickory) cell phone. A few folks recommended Grand Central, so I checked it out. I tried to sign up, not on their home page was a note that they were purchased by Google and would become Google Voice. Over to Google Voice I went, signed in, and....nothing. Just a box that said that it wasn't available yet, but if I was interested to click a button. I clicked the button, and heard nothing but crickets for months.
Then late last week, a few people on twitter posted that they were trying out Google Voice. They had gotten invites, and I was still wondering where mine was. Lo and behold, this morning I had an invite to Google Voice waiting in my GMail account.
The first thing I did was go sign up. When you sign in the first time, you are prompted to select your phone number. You can enter your Zip Code or your Area Code and then search for phone numbers. I put in my area code and there were plenty of numbers available. There is also a place where you can type your name or some phrase that you want your phone number to spell, but I bypassed that. I found a number I liked (it's a palindrome!) and selected it. Once I did that, I had to tell Voice where to forward the number to. I put in my cell phone number and it accepted it. It then said that it needed to call my phone to verify that it was setup. I clicked OK and 3 seconds later my phone rang. I had to enter in a code that was on the website, and as soon as I did, the site marked my number as "confirmed". That was totally impressive that it was that fast! I then proceeded to record my greeting on my phone.
At this point, my account was setup and ready to go. I spent the next little bit clicking around and getting familiar with the web interface. It felt very familiar, just like all of Google's products.
Some neat features...
- "Call Presentation" is pretty neat. When someone dials my number, they are prompted to say their name. Once they do that, my phone rings and asks me if I would like to accept a call from them. I can press 1 to accept the call, or I can let the call go straight to voicemail. This will be wonderful for all those blasted credit card companies that call me!
- You can txt from the website. Just put in a number and go. If you have your Google Address Book setup with phone numbers, you can use that to txt from. The one thing that I noticed is that if someone replies to your text, you get it on your phone, but it doesn't come from the senders phone number, it comes from Google. This seems like a bug to me, so hopefully they will resolve that early on.
- You can setup different greetings for different groups of your contacts. You can also turn the "Call Presentation" on and off for each group.
- There is a very nice history of all incoming and outgoing calls/txts. Looks and feels like GMail.
The only thing that Voice was lacking that I wanted is the ability to transfer an existing phone numbers. I'd really like to do that and totally get rid of Vonage. I know they are working on it because they have a neat little interface to "vote" for what upcoming features you want most.
There is much much more, I just haven't messed with all of it yet. I read on their blog that Google will transcribe your voicemails and send you email with the text. That sounds great, but I have heard mixed reviews about the accuracy of said transcriptions.
Basically, Google has done it again with Voice. I am totally stoked to see the continued integration with Google's other services like Chat and GMail. If you never signed up indicating your interest, I believe you can still do it by heading over to http://voice.google.com and signing in with your Google account.
Any other cool features I need to explore?
A new tool for organization: Lists by Zenbe
I've been crazy busy lately. So much so that I haven't even had time to post much on this very blog. Between NCSU work, AmberCube work, my leadership class, home, and everything else I have going, I started to lose track of the little things. I typically pride myself in remembering all these little things, as I rarely write things down. But for whatever reason, that has become an incredible challenge lately.
This led me on the hunt for the best solution for organizing my tasks. For something to work for me, their interface has to be clean and easy. It has to be accessible via the web, and have a native iPhone app. Because for me, if it's not on my iPhone, it's not going to get used. It would be a plus if there was a native OSX app too, but that was not a requirement.
My search started with this article from lifehacker, comparing 5 iPhone apps. I had tried Remember the Milk before, but it just didn't give me that warm and fuzzy feeling. Also, I am unwilling to pay $25/year for something unless I KNOW with 100% certainty that I will use it. And since you can't get RTM on your iPhone unless you pay $25, and I won't know if it will work for me unless it is on my iPhone, I am left with the classic chicken-or-the-egg problem. I then tried out EasyTask, which had a nice interface, but no web interface. It did have a native OSX client that could sync with the "cloud", and therefore sync with your iPhone, but I had to have a web app, so it was out. I then found things, which was a beautifully designed piece of software, but no web interface and it was like $70 for the desktop app and the iPhone app. Nope, not gonna happen. Then I found Zenbe Lists.
Zenbe Lists had a decent little web interface. Extremely simple, extremely minimal. Task lists, tasks, due dates. That's it. And it had an iPhone app. The iPhone app costs $2.99, but I decided to give it a whirl and try it. Well, I've been using it for about a week now, and I can't tell you how much it has helped. The satisfaction of checking off something is great, and I feel like I am not as stressed anymore trying to remember where to go and what to do. It is almost as revolutionary as when I started using Google Calendar. It really has helped me organize my life and get back on track.
So for all you iPhone people out there looking for a good task list manager, and you don't need all the frills, check out Zenbe Lists. They are awesome.
Twitter Rules of Engagement
Twitter is a magnificent communication tool. Since the advent of AOL Instant Messenger in the late 90's, there hasn't been another service that I have adopted quite so easily, and in turn have it become such an integral part of how I communicate.
As twitter has integrated itself into my life, I have begun to evangelize it quite a bit. I get a lot of value from twitter, and so I like to share that with people. Twitter is still new to lots of people, and everyone who joins twitter does so for their own reasons. Some reasons I have heard are to get news, stay connected with long-distant contacts, stalk celebrities, and because everyone else is doing it. My reasons are a combination of all of those.
As twitter's popularity seems to grow, many folks (myself included) have compiled a list of...rules?...guidelines?...acceptable uses? Whatever you want to call it, they are a list of things which allow me to get value from twitter. For lack of better terms, I'll call them my Twitter Rules of Engagement. I use these loosely formed guidelines to determine who I follow, what I tweet, etc. Without further adieu, here they are:
Just because people follow you does not mean you have to return the favor
I seriously don't know how people who follow 10K+ people can get anything out of twitter. To me, the purpose is to stay connected to people, and with that many people posting, how can you possibly find any time to keep up with them? I have trouble just keeping up with the 100ish people I follow. I think to keep twitter useful, you gotta be selective about who you keep up with, so just because some random dude follows you, it doesn't mean you have to follow him back. I promise, you won't offend the twitter gods!
Posting everything via BrightKite is annoying
This is a pet peeve of mine. I'm sure BrightKite is a great service for some (I don't use it), but it has single handedly made me unfollow some folks because all I ever got from them was a "I'm at Waffle House" or "I'm at <some random address>". Maybe it is harsh, but for me to get something worthwhile from your twitter feed, I need something besides your location with a link to BrightKite. Maybe I'm missing the point of BrightKite? This is not to say that some of that is OK, just not every dang post.
Re-Tweeting is not required
I read a decent article about the etiquitte of re-tweeting, so I won't go into when to and when not to re-tweet. I just think that if over 50% of your posts are re-tweets, you should maybe think about having some more original thoughts. Also, it is totally annoying when you have a bunch of friends that re-tweet the same thing, but I understand it. Just don't re-tweet to the point where re-tweeting is all you tweet.
There is a limit to how much you should tweet
This one is totally subjective, but I will tell you my rule. I use twhirl as my computer twitter client, and if I look at twhirl and your tweets encompass the entire feed (usually comes to about 4 or 5 tweets in a row), then you get a warning. Do it twice and you're out. It's just too much for me.
It is OK to un-follow someone
There....I said it. If someone breaks your own twitter rules of engagement, it is OK to un-follow them. Twitter has to work for you, just like any communication tool. And if someone is getting in the way of your twitter experience, un-follow them. You will be happier, and your tweet-life will be more fulfilling.
So there is my list. What other twitter-like "rules" do you guys have?
Disconnect Sundays
Erin and I are addicted to being connected. If we're not writing something for our blog(s), we are posting something on twitter or facebook. If there is nothing on TV, you can find Erin immersed in a solitaire game on her phone and me checking Digg for the latest in what's happening. We eat, sleep, work, workout, and get online. I blame it on our iPhones, but it's not just that.
Everyone says that having all these ways to stay connected will bring you closer to people. Well, that is true for people who you normally wouldn't be connected to, like old high school friends. But it has turned out the exact opposite (at least for us) for the people who you are supposed to stay connected to all the time....like say....your spouse. We found that we are communicating through twitter, facebook and blogs as opposed to old fashioned talking....and that really isn't working for us.
So we have decided to challenge ourselves to "Disconnect Sundays". Basically, it means that we use Sundays as the day to spend quality time with each other by putting down the cell phones and computers. No twitter. No facebook. No texting. No internet. We have to keep our cell phones on because that is the only phone we have, but we are going to police ourselves and stay off of them for anything other than answering calls that we would deem "emergency".
Hopefully this will remove some distractions from our lives and allow us to focus on doing things together. Not sure how long it will last, but I think it is a good goal to have. I challenge anyone else out there who finds they are so connected to the entire world that they feel disconnected from their world to do the same. I'll keep you all updated with our progress....just not on Sundays
My First iPhone App
Last week, I made my very first iPhone application. Not just a web app either, I made a real live, run on an emulator, Objective-C iPhone application.
This is something that I have been wanting to get into since Apple announced that developers could create their own native iPhone apps. Up until now, I never really had time to do it. But....I am taking an iPhone development class in a few weeks so I figured I better at least know a little bit before going in there and embarrassing myself. And I have never looked at Objective-C, so I was just a noob all around.
So I started at http://developer.apple.com/iphone, signed up for a developer account, and proceeded to download and watch every...single...tutorial. It was great, and I learned a lot just by watching those. I then installed the iPhone SDK and away I went.
I found several tutorials that really helped. In about 2 hours, I had a native iPhone app up and running.
What did I make? It was simple actually. It was a points calculator for weight watchers. Nothing fancy, and nothing that the app store will ever approve because I am not nor have any affiliation with weight watchers. It was just a challenge and I wanted to learn, so I did.
I then proceeded to Amazon.com and ordered this book that was recommended by a colleague:
As soon as I get it and read it, I will post a review. For right now, I'm just excited to be working on this stuff. I guarantee that something from me will be in the App Store sometime soon (muhahahahaha).
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- Friday afternoon before a week at #tek12 is dragging. Ready for the work day to be over! #beer30 2 hrs ago
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