The blog of Abraham Williams

A couple of days ago a post titled hackathons are bad for you started making the rounds. Here’s a standard recipe for a Hackathon. Gather a bunch of developers in a location. Supply them copious amounts of junk food, booze and caffeine. Tell them to get cracking for 24hrs. As a generalization that is somewhat accurate...but I’ve been a regular fixture at hackathons for several years now, and I’ve learned one very important thing: hackathons are what you make of them. Sleep There is an almost masochistic take on sleep deprivation in the developer community. (It might be true with other professions, but let’s focus on the devs.) It certainly isn’t specific to developers and it tends to be more of a cultural thing. Pinning this on hackathons is a bit unfair when you see the large percentage of Americans in general that suffer from sleep deprivation. Hackathons have time limits because they want everyone to have the same constraints, not because they don’t want you to slee...

"Thoroughly entertained by Abrahams presention on Unicorns (developers), and how to manage and encourage them within your community. I've seen his pitch a couple times and it gets more polished each time. I don't want to call his talk "the basics", I think "the essentials", is more appropriate. Every business looking to launch an API should watch his talk" -  Kin Lane  

The last two days have been filled with awesome talks of developer communities, code philosophies, merriment, and food consumption. @ GitHub pulled off an excellent first @ CodeConf and I'm already anticipating the next one. I've laid out my thoughts on a few presentations below plus an embed of some choice tweets from attendees. Metrics, Metrics Everywhere by @ coda Unfortunately I missed this presentation but I hear it was really good and I'm looking to implement some of the ideas for my upcoming @ unicornmetrics project. Hacking Space Exploration by @ arielwaldman Space is awesome! Documentation isn’t optional by @ jacobian Excellent documentation is key and it should be readable. Networks with Node.js by @ ryah Windows has a lot of issues but it is still the dominant OS platform. OSS on GitHub: Your Community is Your Best Feature by @ ginatrapani Make it super easy for your community to contribute. Especially in none code related ways. The ...

Looking to spend more time drowning your infrastructure operations sorrow at the bar? Better start moving your @ Hadoop cluster to @ OpenStack . Or at least that is what 100 NoSQL developers learned at tonights Seattle Monthly Hadoop / Scalability / NoSQL Meetup ( #SEAHUG) . MapReduce has never been easier then with Karmaphere Studio available for NetBeans and Eclipse. They provide a free community edition and a prefesional version if you need something a little more hardcore. @ abetaha gave a rundown on using the toolset to rapidly design and deploy Hadoop jobs for your uber data crunching needs. www. flick r .com Photos from tonights meetup. Once you get your Hadoop cluster running (you set it up on OpenStack right?) be sure to look for @ rackspace 's upcoming iPhone application being built by @ greenisus . It will support any @ OpenStack cloud for checking resource consumption, server health or spinning up new instances. The app will even pull in the uptime notific...

Tonight Amazon hosted their final Seattle Amazon Web Services User Group (@ sawsug ) meeting of the year. A grand showing of about 50 participants was kicked off by @ jeffbarr with a State of the Union including information about Jeff's new book and AWS's new free tier . AWS free tier avail to experiment on getting started on cloud. 750 hrs machine time included. #sawsug #aws 26 Oct via Mobile Web Seattle AWS Users sawsug After a short pizza break @ tkunze demonstrated how Makara leverages cloud infrastructure to make building and maintaining server stacks easy. While the Makara interface might not be something to write home about they support an impressive number of cloud providers and stack types. Even more impressive then the two minute stack setup is the plethora of statistics collected by their system. Everything from standard server metrics, to application performance comparisons, to transaction times. Makara even uses its own platform to spin up 120 EC2 ser...

These are the four presentations I enjoyed the most from @ startupschool . You can find there rest on Justin.tv . Paul Graham of Y Combinator Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv Brian Chesky of AirBnB Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv Dalton Caldwell of Imeem & Picplease Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv

I have been accepted to Startup School (yaaaay!) but I don't have any money for travel (boooo!). So I am looking for someone to sponsor my travel expenses from SEA to SFO. According to http://www.hipmunk.com/startupschool the total cost of the flight will be between $220 and $320. I have thought of several possible exchanges for the sponsorship but I am open to negotiations. * Karma and a hug because you are awesome and have everything you need. * A workday of consulting/contracting from me. * Time spent coding or contributing to an open source project of your choice. * An interview for a job at your company. * A night of hacking on your project. * A four month subscription to @ therealcaro 's baked good of the month club. * Other stuff?... Please feel free to contact me at 4braham@gmail.com or @ abraham . I'm actively looking for a job/startup to co-found, preferably working with a developer community and an API. Hacker News post

Backchannel dashboard for the Minimalism in Feature Implementation presentation at Social App Workshop . Oh ya. This is pretty much just a test to see how it works. Please leave the #hashtag, URL, and @abraham for the most immersive experience possible. :) #Minimalism in Feature Implementation Backchannel - Twitter conversation

CloudCamp Seattle happened last month but I recently ran across the video of the closing discussion. Another video: