Elemental Technologies

Everyone has heard the hype of the moving to cloud hosting -- it’s faster; it’s cheaper, it’s more secure, it’s more flexible… But do the offerings live up to these expectations? How do you choose the right vendor? How do you estimate the costs? Come join us to hear from a panel of cloud experts as they share their use cases, experiences, and advice to help you choose the best cloud model for you.

Questions to be answered:

How do you choose from the various options? How do you control the costs? What kind of monitoring do you need? What kind of training do you need? How do you migrate? How do you maintain security and control?

This event features professional panelists and a moderator with industry leadership and in-depth practical experience expertise in Cloud Architecture and insight into the new advances in this area.

Panel

Al Kari, Principal Enterprise Architect - Cloud Practice, Red Hat

Jared Cheney, Senior Vice President of Client Operations at Atmosera

Khawaja Shams, VP of Engineering at Elemental Technologies

Ryan Comingdeer, CTO, Five Talent Software

Moderator John Gasper, VP of Engineering, Skyward.io

Happy new year! Want to build a mobile app in 2016? Come join us and learn how to use RubyMotion to build that app in half the time in a syntax that you will enjoy!

Our first meeting of the new year we will be a workshop. We will walk through getting a free version of RubyMotion installed on your laptop, building an iOS app to fetch data from an API, display the data as a list, pass data from the list to a detail screen, and apply some basic styling.

We'll be at a new location, provided by Elemental Technologies. You're on your own for dinner until we can find a pizza sponsor.

More event details available on Meetup.com PDXCloud page

We've got a special guest from Amazon Web Services who is going to give us a rundown of all the products and features that were announced two weeks ago at AWS re:Invent. And there were a lot! Undoubtedly, we'll want to dive deeper into some of these topics, so bring your questions. Since we'll have much to talk about, we're going to limit this meeting to a single presenter.

Our presenter: Khawaja Shams is the Head of Engineering for NoSQL at Amazon Web Services. He is a passionate distributed systems engineer, loves to code, and all it takes to distract him is a refreshing discussion around coding a new distributed systems app. Prior to joining Amazon, Khawaja led the Data Services team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he owned distributed systems for tactical operations of dozens of missions across NASA including the Curiosity Mars rover, Voyager, Deep Space Network, Cassini, and International Space Station. Khawaja owned development of the data processing pipelines for all Mars images as they are beamed back to earth and pushed out to global community of scientist, operators, as well as the public. @ksshams

Administrivia:

As usual, we'll open the doors at 6:30pm. Join us for pizza and beer! At around 7pm, we'll start the presentation.

Join us for A Discussion on Tech Careers at Elemental.

A panel of engineers and managers will discuss what their jobs entail, what projects they work on, what problems they solve, and the paths they took to their current careers. 

• Sabina Andersson - Product Manager

• Joan Morgan - QA Engineer

• Meghan Mueller-Cox - Release Manager

• Jenna Hildebrand - QA Engineer

A Q&A session will follow and we encourage attendees to ask questions.

Program:

6:00-6:30 - Check-In + Networking 

6:30-7:30 - Panel: "A Discussion on Tech Careers" + Q&A

7:30-8:00 - Networking

About Elemental:

Elemental Technologies is the leading supplier of software-defined video solutions for content delivery to any device. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, the company pioneered the use of software-defined video processing to distribute video over IP networks. The Elemental platform provides the flexibility, scalability and performance required to deliver high quality video via turnkey, cloud-based and virtualized deployment models. Powering video experiences for more than 400 leading media franchises worldwide, Elemental helps pay TV operators, content programmers, broadcasters and enterprise customers bring video to any screen, anytime – all at once. The company has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, China, Russia, India and Brazil. 

Website: http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/

please register through meetup.com so I can get a good headcount for pizza and beverages

“Reinventing black boxes”

Description: Open source has a long history of reimplementing, and reverse engineering proprietary tools. This talk will integrate the tools needed to reverse engineer into stories of how it has been done before.

Abstract: There is a constant need to provide open source glue, and alternatives to new technology. Learning how to analyze black boxes frees you from having to wait for someone else to do it. When you solve the puzzle yourself you will really understand how it works.

Reverse engineering is a lot like debugging. There are open source full development stacks including debugging for almost every operating system, and architecture. There are a few other tools you need, but with decades of reinvention the toolbox will usually have everything you need.

Since black boxes aren’t documented it’s impossible to know for sure if you will have the skills you need ahead of time. They are puzzles which might be easy, or hard. Chances are you won’t have to go it alone for long as other people, and whole communities often want the same thing that you do.

Bio: Daniel Johnson is a full stack developer who has been programming since 1990, and focused on Open Source technologies since 2003. Jobs have ranged from telephone tech support to systems administration, and freelance software development. He has spent the most time in the last few years working with Rails, AngularJS, Android, and Arduino. He was the first person to document how to use the intel real sense 3d camera with Linux.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing, pizza and refreshments!

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

please register through meetup.com so I can get a good headcount for pizza and beverages

This will be our 2nd birthday! Come celebrate two years of PDXCloud with us. There will be cake! And of course pizza, beer, and other refreshments.

Our first topic is presented by Ryan Dearing: Building a Fault Tolerant API with Hystrix

See how Bodybuilding.com utilizes Hystrix to scale a REST API beyond a hundred million requests every day. Learn how we use Hystrix to build a distributed system that is both fault and latency tolerant. We will discuss the bulkhead and circuit breaker patterns used by Hystrix to provide a resilient and fast API.

The second talk will be an "Intro to Splunk", presented by Jason LaPier, Lead Architect of Elemental Technologies' Cloud platform.

On the surface, Splunk is a log aggregator, but once you start to go beyond that, you can see the potential and the power of Splunk as a data management tool. I’ll briefly go over the components and architecture of Splunk, some of the key features and product offerings, and then dive into a demo of how it works and how we use it at Elemental. Centralized logging is a critical tool in a cloud-based environment, as it lets you review the history and analysis of data from instances that have come and gone at any time.

As always, doors will open at 6:30PM, so feel free to show up a little early to grab food and drink and do some socializing. Presentation will start at 7PM.

Paul Irvine will be presenting:

Topic: using MySQL triggers to simplify application front ends, reporting queries, performance, batch processing, by denormalizing a data model in the triggers.

It sounds like something you might not want to do, most folks are taught normalization, never denormalization, but I’ve been doing this since the early 90’s on SQLServer, then on Oracle in the mid-90’s, and a few others, and of course MySQL since they introduced triggers. In truth, I learned about these techniques in the mid-80’s in some none-SQL proprietary relational products that had the features ‘built-in’.

A lot of people already use triggers for basic validation, and some people use them for more complex validation. A few even use them for some computed column value setting. That’s cool. The sorts of things I do are to replicate, propagate and maintain redundant copies of data, or to aggregate data. This usually makes user presentation many factors simpler for many application types, especially reporting, as it simplifies queries. And the cost to implement is marginal to none.

I’m a fan of using auto-increment keys in MySQL, because so many development frameworks like Rails, PHPRunner, Cake and others find it easy to use and address records in grids, and forms.

BASECOPYDOWN

In this denormalization, the child triggers retrieve a copy of the parent row’s relevant ‘natural’ key information.

Example : order detail rows retrieve the parent ‘order number’, the natural human order number, not the primary key auto increment. And that order number gets copied to a real column in the Order Line Item row. This means that reports, and user queries can very easily retrieve line items for orders using (human) order number now. And do real sorts. And the application code has zero work to do to gain this benefit. Three lines of trigger code do it all. And its guaranteed. SUMS

Very often, a parent row needs rapid access to the SUM of a column from its child rows. The simple way in a trigger would be to select(count()) on the child recs, and put the count in the parent row, but this has potential impact on the parent update. The cost of a query select against the child table. The way I do it is to put the code in the child triggers, to do an incremental update against the parent row. So as the child row is added, the new child value is added to the parent SUM column and updated. This gets more complicated on updates on the child, involving some difference computation and some stored procs to optimize the code, but the code is simple and templatized. And guarantees no select count() performance degradation, but gets the benefit of the running totals on the parent record for no more than one additional update.

And yes, I’ll be happy to share the template code for insert/update/delete trigger difference computation.

A similar process can be used to keep the count of child records in a parent table.

And of course these can cascade up and down more than one level.

Imagine a timesheet week or day entry that sums the values to the timesheet, that sums the values to the week aggregate record, or a group/project/division record of some sort for job costing… easy and trivial to do, but if that had to be done in application code, whether a middle tier or front end, it would get costly, and not guaranteed to be consistent depending on who updates what rows using what code.

The trigger guarantees robust integrity, minimal performance impact and maximum app benefit no matter whether its an app server updating, a front end updating, a mobile interface or an API.

Denormalizing is not only an efficient thing to do, it can save the front end developer some significant effort in data manipulation to assemble, select, filter and display aggregate, parent or child based information.

Agenda / Speaker is open.

Agenda / Speaker is open.

please register through meetup.com so I can get a good headcount for pizza and beverages

We have two topics for the next meeting, September 10th.

Presenter: Max Murphy Max is going to talk about how we can take lessons learned from using cloud technologies and apply them on the ground, in a standard data center. Max Murphy is a Lead DevOps engineer for Kongregate.

Presenter: Deis is an open-source Platform-as-a-Service inspired by Heroku and powered by CoreOS and Docker. Chris will demo Deis and discuss how it uses CoreOS and Docker to enable developers to deploy their applications to cloud providers or bare metal with just a 'git push'. Learn more at: http://deis.io/

Chris Armstrong is a core maintainer of Deis and Senior Software Engineer at OpDemand, where he focuses on customer growth and community. He loves contributing to open source and interacting with its community.

A big thank you to Chris for making the trip down from Seattle to present to us!

As usual, we'll open the doors at 6:30pm and start the meeting at 7pm. Get their early and have some pizza, beer, and other refreshments.

Agenda / Speaker is open. If no better option arises, I will just give the presentation on pt-query-digest that I am giving earlier in the month to coworkers.

http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.2/pt-query-digest.html

please register through meetup.com so I can get a good headcount for pizza and beverages

Come join an amazing group of people at Elemental Technologies! There will be food, wine, beer, and great conversation! Be sure to find Joan Morgan, QA Engineer at Elemental. Read our newsletter for more fun facts about her; it's a great conversation starter!

PDX Women in Tech exists to celebrate professional women in the Portland-metro area who work with, manage, lead or have an interest in technology. Whether you are developing event-driven, non-blocking applications in node.js or setting technology strategy for a Fortune 500 company–or anything in between–come join us!

Come hack on Calagator, the open source calendar aggregator.

We'll be digging in to open issues, working on some refactoring tasks, and getting new folks acquainted with the code base.

Catch up on the current status with these notes from Open Source Bridge: http://opensourcebridge.org/wiki/2014/Calagator

Also check out the current issues in our tracker: https://github.com/calagator/calagator/issues

Calagator is a Ruby/Rails web app.

We have two topics for the next meeting, July 9th.

TOPIC: When Less is More – Reduced Footprint Cloud OS Do you roll, have you rolled, or would–you-consider-if-it-were-easier rolling your own (RYO) cloud OS? (and this includes customizing a cloud OS that you derive from CentOS, Ubuntu Cloud, etc.) General purpose Linux distributions have competed for years on the basis of application and platform breadth. In recent years, Linux has exploded in mobile, in large part because it was reassembled from the ground up for smartphones, tablets and wearables. And now we’re seeing numerous streamlined, “minimal footprint” Linux distributions for the Cloud, networking and other server applications where general purpose distributions are overkill. With tailored footprint Linux distributions in mind, we’d like to explore the motivations behind (or against) “rolling your own” Cloud OS.

Presenters:

· Steve Sakoman, Project Architect, Intel Open Source Technology Center

· Margaret LaBrecque, Evangelist, Intel Open Source Technology Center

Steve brings many years of OS development to the table, having been VP of OS and Server Technology at Apple, Chief Product Officer at PalmSource, and co-founder and COO/CTO of Be, Inc. In addition to leading development of the Mac OS X Server, Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and PalmOS 5 releases, Steve is a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s Yocto Project Advisory Board.

Margaret has driven numerous industry initiatives in the areas of mobile OS (MeeGo, Tizen) and wireless radio access. As President of the WiMAX Forum, she led a successful global policy initiative to accelerate and ensure technology-neutral access to 4G spectrum. As a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she developed curriculum on the dynamics behind new entrants to the cellular industry. She’s currently focused on open source software for servers.

Steve and Margaret work in the Open Source Technology Center at Intel.

TOPIC: TripleO (Openstack on Openstack) https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO

TripleO is an OpenStack program aimed at installing, upgrading, and operating OpenStack clouds using OpenStack's own facilities. This is done using Ironic (or nova-bm) for bare metal deployments, Heat for orchestration, diskimage-builder for (you guessed it!) building disk images, and an array of other tools.

This talk will give a crash course on the motivation behind TripleO and some of its components, how it works, and how were trying to bring CI/CD clouds to the masses by using golden-image based deployments.

Presenter: Gregory Haynes

As usual, we'll open the doors at 6:30pm and start the meeting at 7pm. Get their early and have some pizza, beer, and other refreshments. A big thank you to Intel for sponsoring the food and drink this month!

The monthly meeting of Portland's first JavaScript and ECMAscript users' group. We host presentations and discussions on everything JavaScript-related - including JavaScript frameworks, node.js, CoffeeScript, and whatever else comes up.

THIS IS NOT OUR USUAL LOCATION! This month only, the meeting will be at Elemental Technologies.

We have three presentations on the agenda this month:

JavaScript, Hardware and the Internet of Things, presented by Gerald Aden

Internet of Things has become a huge opportunity for software, hardware and designers alike to create solutions for both consumers and businesses. We'll explore how to get started using JavaScript/Node.js, a Raspberry PI and the Cloud to easily get started developing for this exciting space.

RactiveJS, presented by Marty Nelson

Ractive.js is a template-driven UI library. Unlike other tools that generate inert HTML, it transforms your templates into blueprints for apps that are interactive by default. Ractive was originally created at theguardian.com by Rich Harris to produce news applications. These apps are heavily interactive, combine HTML and SVG, and are developed under extreme deadline pressure. It has to work reliably across browsers, and perform well even on mobile devices.

Ractive is a library, not a framework. Where some tools force you to learn a new vocabulary and structure your app in a particular way, Ractive works for you, not the other way around – and it plays well with other libraries. In this talk, we'll go over the main features of Ractive.js, and also show possible integrations that highlight the varied approaches to working with Ractive.

Marty Nelson is a contributor to the Ractive open-source project. A 15 year veteran (survivor?) of enterprise software development he has been a developer, manager and lead architect. The last few years he has been focused on javascript, both in node and the browser, and web and mobile app development with HTML5.

Mystery bonus presentation

We may or may not be able to get to the final presentation. So for now it will remain a mysterious secret!

Feel free to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxjs if you too are a JavaScript admirer. Or visit our web site for more information at http://pdxjs.com/.

If you're interested in making a presentation at this or at a future meet-up, please e-mail Luc Perkins ([email protected]) and Jesse Hallett ([email protected]).

Exciting meeting coming up this month! We have two really interesting and useful cloud technologies to talk about: database-as-a-service, and monitoring-as-a-service.

Orchestrate: Matt Heitzenroder is the co-founder and COO of Orchestrate (http://orchestrate.io), which is a new startup here in Portland. Orchestrate is a Database-as-a-Service, which unifies multiple types of databases behind a single REST API that is optimized for queries like full-text search, graph, time-series, geospatial, and key/value. Matt will talk about his experience with databases in the cloud and what led him and his co-founders to create Orchestrate. Matt will share the vision of Orchestrate for cloud and databases and top off the evening with a demo and Q&A session.

Stackdriver: Josh Vaughn-Uding, Senior DevOps Engineer at CrowdCompass will present on how his team monitors their AWS environment using Stackdriver. Stackdriver (http://www.stackdriver.com/) provides powerfully simple monitoring-as-a-service that helps DevOps spend more time on dev and less on ops. Created by a team of DevOps and SaaS experts and backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners, Stackdriver focuses on helping cloud-powered companies address performance bottlenecks before they impact customers while reducing the burden associated with patchwork monitoring solutions.

DATE/TIME: Wednesday, May 14th. Doors open at 6:30PM, presentations start at 7.

LOCATION: Elemental Technologies, 225 SW Broadway, 6th Floor.

PROVISIONS: Pizza, beer, non-alcoholic refreshments.

OPTIONAL R.S.V.P. (helps us plan for food): http://www.meetup.com/PDXCloud/events/176163212

• 6:30 - 7:00: Networking

• 7:00 - 7:15: Ed Borasky will give a wrap-up of the most interesting projects shown at the NICAR 2014 conference in Baltimore.

• 7:15 - 7:45: Catherine Nikolovski of Hack Oregon will talk about mining and visualizing the ORESTAR campaign finance database. She'll also talk about a new project called BallotPath, which will deliver a complete list of all elected officials, from school district up to Governor and Senator to a voter based on location.

• 7:45 - ??: Hands-on tool gathering. Bring your laptop, and an 8 GB or bigger USB stick (or writable DVD if you must). Ed will have copies of OSGeo Live, Tails, and of course CompJournoStick.

Topic: Refactoring Legacy Codebases

**Note: Code-n-Splode (CnS) is a women-focused group. All self-identified women and genderqueer persons are invited to attend and participate, and men are welcome as the guest of a female participant.

For more information, visit our website, or send an email to our list.

PDXCloud monthly meetup. Join us for cloud technology-related discussions!

Interested in presenting? Contact jason.lapier AT gmail or hit up the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxcloud.

PDXCloud monthly meetup. Join us for cloud technology-related discussions!

Interested in presenting? Contact jason.lapier AT gmail or hit up the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxcloud.

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

Puppet is graciously providing food sponsorship, so remember to thank them.

Bart Massey will be talking about workflow design and implementation, including how he publishes Inform 7 code on Github and generic shell scripts he has created for dealing with single-person small repo workflows.

Jason LaPier will also be speaking about how his small team at Elemental uses Atlassian Stash and how it is different than the more common Github workflows.

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

PDXCloud met for the first time in November 2012, and now it's time to celebrate our one year anniversary!

This Wednesday we will have a panel of guests talking around the theme, "Why We Chose Cloud, and What We've Learned". We have a group of panelists (many thanks to those that have agreed to sit on the panel so far), and we still have room for a few more if anyone is interested. If you have any inclination to answer questions about your company's use of cloud technologies and the factors and decisions that went into selecting those technologies, please send me an email ([email protected]). No presentations will be required, this will mainly be a Q&A session.

For the rest of you, bring plenty of questions for our panelists!

As usual, we'll have pizza, beer, and other refreshments, and additionally, we'll have a birthday cake to celebrate PDXCloud's 1 year anniversary!

As usual, doors open at 6:30pm, meeting starts at 7pm. Hope to see you on Wednesday!

Topic: Tools and Tips Roundtable

Bring an example of something - a technique or tool - that helps you get things done!

**Note: Code-n-Splode (CnS) is a women-focused group. All self-identified women and genderqueer persons are invited to attend and participate, and men are welcome as the guest of a female participant.

For more information, visit our website, or send an email to our list.

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

Puppet is graciously providing food sponsorship, so remember to thank them.

This meeting will be a Git-related hackathon. Bring your Git projects and questions and hack near other DAG-loving individuals. If you would like to present a lightning talk or something bigger, please let me know!

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

Topic this month: From Ground to Cloud

Jason LaPier, Lead Cloud Architect and Max Murphy, Senior DevOps Engineer at Elemental Technologies will talk about taking a software product and stack designed to run on specific hardware and migrating it to cloud-based deployments. Challenges and features that will be covered:

• maintaining development parity with the continued hardware-deployed versions of the software;
• managing strict software package requirements;
• making products available in all AWS regions;
• using AWS's Virtual Private Cloud networking capabilities;
• using centralized logging to monitor and maintain multiple cloud-based deployments.

Have your own Ground to Cloud story? Bring it and let's discuss!

See you on Wednesday night. This month, pizza and refreshments are courtesy of Mirantis. Mirantis has rescheduled their OpenStack training course for November 12th - please register here: http://bit.ly/17viYFU with the Nov_PDX discount code to save $200.

Doors open at 6:30pm and presentation starts around 7.

The topic is currently open, but we'll meet and find something to discuss. Send an email to the list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxcloud) if you have any ideas or requests.

See you on Wednesday night, and always there will be pizza and refreshments. Doors open at 6:30pm and presentation starts around 7.

This week we have a great presentation lined up from Matthew Hooker called "Cloud-Native DevOps". Matthew works for Simple.com, the innovative finance company that wants to replace your bank.

Abstract:

The role of IT administrators is constantly evolving. We've been burdened (bestowed?) with the task of automating as much as possible as our infrastructure changes faster than we can keep up.

Until 2005, you were probably using CFEngine or shell scripts and whatever package manager your OS supported. Around that time Puppet and Chef dropped, and it was enlightening. Then, in 2008, EC2 went stable, and the term DevOps started gaining popularity the next year.

Unfortunately, both Puppet and Chef arrived just on the cusp of the transition to IaaS, before we understood best practices for operating in this new environment. These tools were the product of years of experience operating raw hardware. There is something lost in translation when we apply these tools to the cloud.

This talk is about how we've worked to bridge the gap, to go Cloud-Native. I'll demonstrate the impedance mismatch that occurs when you run chef in the cloud, and how we created a system better adapted to this new environment. I'll argue that instances need to be treated as ephemeral; that the ability to quickly launch instances is critical to agility; and reinforce the idea that automation is essential at every step of the process.

By the end I hope I can convince you that there are ways to operate with more agility, to insulate yourselves from failure, and let every engineer sleep better at night.

I also hope to inspire you to look for the gaps, and to come up with better ways to close them. This is only the beginning. We need fresh eyes and new ideas.

See you on Wednesday night, and always there will be pizza and refreshments. Doors open at 6:30pm and presentation starts around 7.

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

We have a new regular venue at Elemental Technologies and there will be food provided by Puppet Labs for those that profess a boundless love for directed acyclic graphs.

Remember to thank Puppet Labs for the food!

During this meeting, Todd Pitt of Zero Strategist will talk about strategically using version control on high-volume websites which run on off-the-shelf software/CMSs, such as Wordpress or Drupal.

There is usually an informal "drinkup" after the meeting at Baileys Tap Room downstairs. If you are headed to the meeting late, we may have migrated there. Since it is also OSCON week, there will also be various other libations to be had around town.

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

ABOUT THE GROUP: pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. Meetings are usually on the third Monday of the month. Website: http://pdxdevops.org/ && Twitter: @pdxdevops

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

We have a new regular venue at Elemental Technologies and there will be food provided by Puppet Labs for those that profess a boundless love for directed acyclic graphs.

Remember to thank Puppet Labs for the food!

During this meeting, Duke will talk about libgit2 and the work his Google Summer of Code student is doing on parrot-libgit2.

There is usually an informal "drinkup" after the meeting at Baileys Tap Room downstairs. If you are headed to the meeting late, we may have migrated there.

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

Rather than posting content on many third-party silos of data, we should all begin owning our own data that we're creating. Publish short status updates on your own domain, and syndicate to Twitter. Publish photos on your own domain, syndicate to Flickr, etc, etc.

This is the basis of the "Indie Web" movement. We'll get together for two days to talk about what has been done in the field, and where still needs to be done. There will be workshops and breakout sessions the second day.

RSVP on the IndieWebCamp Wiki

See the full schedule

This week we have a great presentation lined up from Galen Pyle of Slalom Consulting (http://www.slalom.com/). Galen is going to talk to us about making a business case for taking advantage of cloud computing.

What: Business Case for Cloud Computing. Learn about key cloud concepts like elasticity and scalability. Introduction to Amazon Web Services features like simple storage, elastic compute, security and pricing.

Why: We can use the cloud to enhance customer value propositions while improving organizational efficiency.

This talk is designed to be accessible to business and sales people as well as engaging to techies. So bring your questions from both sides of the cloud equation!

Pizza and beer will be provided by Elemental. Doors open at 6:30 and the talk will start at 7pm.

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

We have a new regular venue at Elemental Technologies and there will be food provided by Puppet Labs for those that profess a boundless love for directed acyclic graphs.

Remember to thank Puppet Labs for the food!

This meeting will be a round table of questions and answers, as well as time to hack on git-related projects and get help from fellow DAG lovers.

There is usually an informal "drinkup" after the meeting at Baileys Tap Room downstairs. If you are headed to the meeting late, we may have migrated there.

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

ABOUT THE GROUP: pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. Meetings are usually on the third Monday of the month. Website: http://pdxdevops.org/ && Twitter: @pdxdevops

Topic: Data Transfer and Storage Optimization in Amazon Web Services

Elemental Technologies specializes in video transcoding software, and moving video around means moving huge amounts of data. Elemental's CTO, Jesse Rosenzweig, will share tricks and techniques for getting data in and out of the cloud quickly and safely. He will cover various options and configurations within Amazon Web Services, including ways to get the most out of S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EBS (Elastic Block Store).

Amazon Web Services will be sponsoring this event by providing beer and pizza for us!

Thanks to Elemental for providing the space, and pizza & beer!

PRESENTATIONS

• We'll have a short time at the beginning of the meeting to share some stories about Igal, then can continue at the after-meeting-beer.
• Markus Roberts, Ruby Hangman for Martes, Seite de Mayo
• Bill Den Beste, Reprise, Inc.: Generating Business Documents with Prawn
• Reid Beels: Generating Business Documents with PDFKit
• ...and lots of great group discussions on Ruby-related topics.

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade, also known as pdxruby and pdx.rb, is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon area. The group welcomes all programmers interested in the language and its implementations, tools, libraries and frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails. The group has been meeting since August 2002 for presentations, demos and discussions. Every month 35-75 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for Ruby. If you'd like to present or have a topic you'd like discussed, please post to the mailing list. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday" -- see you there!

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

We have a new regular venue at Elemental Technologies and there will be food provided by Puppet Labs for those that profess a boundless love for directed acyclic graphs.

Remember to thank Puppet Labs for the food!

The following people will be presenting:

Jonathan "Duke" Leto will present on the .gitconfig of @igalko . In particular, Duke will describe why Igal's .gitconfig was so amazing, as well as comparing it to the Duke's own .gitconfig for maximal DAG-induced enlightment.

@bak will be presenting about the git code-review utility and how it can do so much in so few lines of code. After this, you will be able to answer the question "WTF is a commitish?".

There is usually an informal "drinkup" after the meeting at Baileys Tap Room downstairs. If you are headed to the meeting late, we may have migrated there.

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

This meeting will be held on 04-22

Hey everyone -

I sincerely apologize for canceling this event with such a late notice. The Portland tech community lost one of its most prominent members yesterday, Igal Koshevoy: http://stumptownsyndicate.org/2013/04/09/goodbye-igal/

Personally, I'm going to need some time to process this loss and I believe others will as well. I apologize to those who didn't know Igal and were looking forward to the meeting tonight. We'll reschedule Jesse's talk on Storage with AWS for next month (May 8th).

If you have any questions, please feel free to use the Google Groups mailing list or contact me directly: - https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/pdxcloud - [email protected]

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

We have a new regular venue at Elemental Technologies and there will be food provided by Puppet Labs for those that profess a boundless love for directed acyclic graphs.

Remember to thank Puppet Labs for the food!

The following people will be presenting:

Duke Leto: State of The DAG, including the new PDX Git logo and website updates

Chris Swenson: The Github API

There is usually an informal "drinkup" after the meeting at Baileys Tap Room downstairs. If you are headed to the meeting late, we may have migrated there.

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

ABOUT THE GROUP: pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. Meetings are usually on the third Monday of the month. Website: http://pdxdevops.org/ && Twitter: @pdxdevops

One of the top challenges of developing web-based services is building the continuous deployment process. Engineering teams spend over 30% of their developer resources building processes like “Deploy my app to Heroku from Github when I say 'deploy' in HipChat”. Most of this time is spent gluing together numerous services (e.g. Github, AWS, Hipchat) and technologies (e.g. Chef, Salt Stack) to work in a cohesive workflow. Maciej Skierkowski, co-founder and CEO of Factor, will show how you can automate your continuous integration and deployment processes in just a couple minutes.

WHEN: Wednesday, March 13th. Doors at 6:30pm, presentation starts at 7pm. There will be lots of pizza and beer so come hungry and thirsty.

RSVP on Plancast: http://plancast.com/p/h2k0 OR Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/PDXCloud/events/107970162/

Contact Christine @ [email protected] for more information

The new PDX Git Together is happening! We have a new regular venue at Elemental Technologies and there will be food provided (thanks Elemental!) for those that profess a boundless love for directed acyclic graphs.

The following people will be presenting:

Jonathan "Duke" Leto - An update about PDXGit Together and recent Git news

Justin Abrahms will present about Gitstreams

Lyzi Diamond will present about how the PyLadiesPDX community uses Github and Github Pages to run pyladiespdx.github.com

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

ABOUT THE GROUP: pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. Meetings are usually on the third Monday of the month. Website: http://pdxdevops.org/ && Twitter: @pdxdevops

Problems of scale are no longer limited to people with massive deployments as those deployment approaches are now trickling down to small deployments. Carl Hall, engineer at Cloudability, will discuss points of failure, how to recover/not explode and and considerations to make when developing in the cloud versus local development.

If you're thinking about moving to cloud-based development and deployment, or if you're just getting started with it, you'll find a lot of useful material here. If you're a cloud veteran, please come and contribute your experience to the discussion.

This month our meeting is sponsored by GLIDER (formerly Superbly) - be sure to thank them for supplying the beer and pizza!

WHEN: Wednesday, Feb 13th. Doors at 6:30pm, presentation starts at 7pm.

RSVP on Plancast: http://plancast.com/p/g341

Contact Christine @ [email protected] for more information

Come join us for pizza and beer as we celebrate the new year (because you can't celebrate enough) and embark on our next discussion - speak and topic TBD.

Doors open at 6:30, presentations start at 7pm. Please let us know if you can make it: http://plancast.com/p/ferv

Contact Christine @ [email protected] for more information

Come by as early as 6:30pm to get a head start on socializing and eating.

PRESENTATIONS:

• "Where to keep configuration data?" Talk discussing the various ways to store the data used as parameters for your configurations and their pros/cons. Sample code will be for Chef, but Puppet equivalents of most of these alternatives will be mentioned.
• ...and a lot more!

ABOUT THE GROUP: pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations. The group meets regularly to share practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation, configuration management, and cloud computing. Meetings are usually on the third Monday of the month. Website: http://pdxdevops.org/ && Twitter: @pdxdevops

ABOUT THE SPONSOR: The venue, food and refreshments are provided by Elemental Technologies, a Portland, Oregon software company that specializes in massively parallel processing solutions for video encoding, decoding and transcoding of video over IP networks. For more information, visit http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/

Come join us for pizza and beer and talk cloud technologies. This week, James Casey, Senior Software Development Engineer at Opscode will give an overview of System Configuration Management, a critical component of cloud-based deployment. He will also introduce us to Chef, a widely used configuration management tool.

Doors open at 6:30, presentations start at 7pm. Please let us know if you can make it: http://plancast.com/p/f2pj

Contact Christine @ [email protected] for more information or check out the Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/PDXCloud/?a=wm1&rv=wm1&ec=wm1#upcoming or Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/pdxcloud

Come join us for pizza and beer as we kick off the first PDXCloud meeting!

Jesse Rosenzweig, CTO and Co-founder of Elemental, will talk about leveraging graphics processing units (GPUs) in Amazon Web Services and Jeremy Wagner-Kaiser, Senior Software Engineer at Cloudability, will give an overview of different cloud service offerings. We will also brainstorm topics for future PDXCloud meetings.

Doors open at 6:30, presentations start at 7pm. Please let us know if you can make it: http://plancast.com/p/degd

Contact Christine @ [email protected] for more information

PRESENTATIONS:

• Jacob Helwig and Markus Roberts: Ruby hangman puzzle
• Igal Koshevoy on using the factory_girl and database_cleaner gems to make integration testing with database records easier, clearer, faster and properly isolated.
• ...and a lot of discussions on various Ruby-related topics

IMPORTANT: Help us prepare enough food and drink for you by (1) going to this Plancast page and clicking the "count me in" link on right side, and (2) tell us which pizza you want.

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade, also known as pdxruby and pdx.rb, is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon area. The group welcomes all programmers interested in the language and its implementations, tools, libraries and frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails. The group has been meeting since August 2002 for presentations, demos and discussions. Every month 35-75 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for Ruby. If you'd like to present or have a topic you'd like discussed, please post to the mailing list. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday" -- see you there!

ABOUT THE SPONSOR: The venue, food and refreshments are provided by Elemental Technologies, a Portland, Oregon software company that specializes in massively parallel processing solutions for video encoding, decoding and transcoding of video over IP networks. For more information, visit http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/