Gig: Speaking at Gotham Ruby Conference 2007

Posted by Nick Sieger Sat, 24 Mar 2007 04:41:00 GMT

Hey! I’ve been so excited and busy at the same time I forgot to mention I’ll be speaking at the Gotham Ruby Conference on April 21st in NYC located at the Googleplex in Chelsea. Hopefully you’ve got your ticket by now, as last I heard there were only a couple of tickets left. You’ll hear me giving the JRuby pitch: Ruby on the best VM on the planet, performance updates, deploying Rails by dropping a file in a Java webserver, and more. Looking forward to carousing with the fine Rubyists in the Tri-State Metro area! Manhattan was my provenance in 1997-1999, where I had my first programming gig out of college, so I feel like I’m coming back to where I got started, in a way.

Only downer -- I’ll miss the second incarnation of Minnebar, which was a blast last year. If you’re near the Twin Cities that weekend you owe it to yourself to attend.

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Minnebar Podcast: Agile Design

Posted by Nick Sieger Tue, 23 May 2006 02:44:00 GMT

In this podcast from minnebar 1, Ben Edwards presents on the topic of agile design. Using memes from the Agile Manifesto and 37 signals among others, Ben does a great job fostering a discussion.

Download the podcast here, or put my feed in iTunes or another podcatcher to have the podcast downloaded for you.

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Minnebar Podcast: Web 2.0 in the Real World

Posted by Nick Sieger Fri, 12 May 2006 03:25:00 GMT

In this podcast from minnebar 1, Jamie Thingelstad, CTO of marketwatch.com, describes a real-world, scalable application of asynchronous javascript that uses an event-driven model rather than polling.

I enjoyed the session and think it’s worth a listen -- there are some interesting approaches discussed, including a back-off strategy that helps give the server a chance to tell its javascript clients to not hit it so hard when it’s under duress.

Download the podcast here, or put my feed in iTunes or another podcatcher to have the podcast downloaded for you. I should be posting more minnebar podcasts in the coming days.

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Let's keep the minnebar high

Posted by Nick Sieger Mon, 08 May 2006 03:17:00 GMT

It’s going to take me a while to recover from minnēbar. I met some great people, got motivated by some new noble ideas, and generally had a blast. A thousand kudos to Ben as well as the sponsors for making the event a smashing success.

But, let’s not stop there. We made some initial contact, hit it off well, vibed off of the energy in the venue. I’d be disappointed to say the least if I didn’t hear from anyone for another six months until the next event gets planned and scheduled.

So, can we make a concerted effort to keep in touch? May I suggest a monthly (or so) geek dinner, drinks or something similarly informal (e.g., the Friday night get together? I wasn’t there) where we can keep some momentum going and build our relationships? Find out where our own strengths are and how we complement each other?

If there’s one thing coming out of Saturday’s event where I hope we have a shared vision, it’s for increasing the amount of innovation in the technology sector in the Twin Cities. This group of people has the talent to make that real.

On a side note, I recorded four sessions of audio from Saturday, and at first listen they appeared to come out pretty well. I hope to post them in the coming days.

Another side note: the “ē” in minnēbar is represented in HTML as unicode entity ē. Don’t let your minnēbar posts suffer encoding issues on the highway!

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