Presenting at the Raleigh-Durham No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium

30 Aug 2010

North Carolina

This week, I made a four day journey to the very forested state of North Carolina. Joey knew a Coloradoan was coming and turned on the statewide AC to bring it down to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit when I landed. The food was great, the people were super, and the technology was awesome.

Relevance

I had an open invitation to come out and visit the team at Relevance, which I'd been waiting to cash in. The Research Triangle NFJS Symposium finally made that visit possible.

I had a great time meeting the entire Relevance team, working with Stu Halloway on automating the Clojure release scripts through some Bash scripting, Git calls and Maven Ant Tasks.

At lunch, I gave a live demo of my workflow with the DevonThink Pro product, including capturing and aggregating multiple RSS streams alongside archived emails and snippets from web pages.

In the afternoon, I had the fun assignment of working with Aaron Bedra on an implementation of JCE symmetric AES encryption on a Clojure project. He followed up a day later on "Relevance Open Source Friday" by beginning to move the implementations over to a standard library for upcoming public consumption.

No Fluff, Just Stuff

I had the pleasure of presenting Encryption, Open Source Debugging on the JVM (over 50 deliveries of that one now), Hadoop, Maven 3 and Git to the engaged audience in Raleigh on Friday and Saturday. The during-presentation questions were spot on, and even when the topics got heady, the students just leaned forward in their chairs and kept on making insightful inquiries. Attendees of that nature are pure candy to a passionate presenter like myself. I especially want to thank Darin Pope, Billy Dupre, David Bloom, David Deininger, Sri Sankaran, Asif Rashid, and Ed Savage for providing much-desired feedback on Twitter.

I know I'll be back for the NFJS show next year, but I'll make all efforts to put in a few more visits prior to that. A city with a technology culture of this strength demands that I do. Thanks for having me and perhaps I'll see some of you at the Rich Web Experience in December on the beaches of sunny Florida.

Resources

For the folks that attended my talks this weekend, here are some constantly updated supplemental materials to resources that are paired with the slides:

Encryption

Open Source Debugging

Hadoop

Maven 3

Git