Blogging Roller

BarCampRDU 2009 was a great success, if I don't say so myself. Here's my brief review. We had excellent turn-out, lots of great session pitches and lots of great sessions. Everything went very smoothly and our estimates for meals, t-shirts and party-budget were spot on. We received lots of positive feedback on Twitter and blogs and at the event. We did have some difficulties with the PA system and a couple of projectors, but we got past them with a little help from our friends.

Here are the links I've rounded up since the event. If you want a taste of BarCampRDU 2009 then check Robert Fischer's excellent podcast and Tanner Lovelace's very-cool time-lapse set to spooky music.

• Robert Fischer: "What's A BarCamp" Featuring BarCampRDU 2009
  Excellent podcast that explains BarCampRDU and includes all session pitches
• Tanner Lovelace: BarCampRDU 2009 Session Grid Timelapse:
  3 minute time-lapse of session grid build, change and tear-down
• eTechSuccess: BarCamp 2009
  "BarCamp was well worth the time" plus a list of the sessions
• Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | BarCamp RDU
  "a well run event that was a lot of fun to attend"
• Best Thing Ever: Getting Involved - NCSU Web Developers
  "I got to meet a lot of really great folks"
• Digital Papercuts: Triangle Tech Week Wrap-Up
  "A big shoutout to [all] the organizers and volunteers for a great unconference"
• Matthew Bass - BarCampRDU was a rousing success
  "I heard several attendees comment that the presentations outdid last year's camp"
• BarCampRDU weekend is here!
  Thanks to host Red Hat all the BarCampRDU 2009 sponsors!

We might have to do it again next year

BarCampRDU 2009 is rapidly approaching (August 8, 2009) and the event is sold out with 250 registered attendees. Problem is, we're only about halfway to our funding goal. I guess it could be the economy or maybe it's event overload; doesn't it seem like we had a heckuva lot of tweetup-camp-athons around here lately?

Either way, we're not ready to give up yet. We're doing another call for sponsors and trying to open up as many sponsor opportunities as possible. Check out the BarCampRDU blog for more information.

We've got a date and a venue for BarCamp RDU 2009, so mark your calendars:

BarCamp RDU 2009 - August 8 at Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, NC

More information and registration coming soon...

The first Triangle Tweetup of the year is tomorrow at the stylin' Glenwood South facilities of Edge Office. There's a site now with an interesting speaker line-up and people tweeting about it (and food).

Count me in!

Update: Reminder the #triangletweetup is a food drive too, bring some nonperishables, info: http://tinyurl.com/6vn3ct via @ginnyskal #givingback

Joe Gregorio: Wow, the local area is really hopping these days, check out the 14 upcoming conferences, camps, workshops and events. Here's some video from the just passed RTP Startup Weekend, we've got coworking sites popping up, and of course a blog to cover it all.

That blog that Joe mentioned is new, NBC 17's 30threads.com, which launched last night at a very well attended blogger, beer and BBQ bash in the Edge Office coworking space in downtown Raleigh. The site is both a community aggregator and a blog authored by local/social media superheros Wayne Sutton and Ginny Skalski. Congrats to Ginny, Wayne and NBC 17 on a great launch and what looks to be a great new community site like no other in the Triangle.

BarCamp RDU 2008 is one week from today and it's shaping up the be the biggest and I hope the best BarCamp RDU so far.

Here are a couple of notes for attendees:

Check the attendee list! On July 21, we decided we had budget and space to register everybody on the waiting list. If you were on the waiting list you are now registered to attend.

Remove yourself if you can't attend. If you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list. For planning purposes, we need to have as accurate a count as is possible.

Propose sessions in advance. If you are interested in initiating or attending a session on a specific topic, then go right ahead and add your topic to the Proposed Sessions list.

Oh, and if you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)

And one final note. BarCamp RDU would not be possible without the very generous financial support of our sponsors and our host. So...

Thanks to the BarCamp RDU 2008 sponsors!

• BlueStripe Software
• Canonical
• Carborro Creative Coworking
• Design Hammer
• Edge Office
• IBM developerWorks
• iContact
• Lulu.com
• Montie Design
• OpenNMS.org
• Red Hat (BarCamp RDU 2006, 2007 and 2008 host)
• rPath
• Viget Labs

See you next Saturday at BarCamp RDU 2008!

Just a gentle reminder that BarCamp RDU 2008 is coming soon. And one request. We've got 209 people registered and 31 on the waiting list so please help us out and if you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list.

If you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)

After attending two great BarCamps here in Raleigh, I'm just as pleased as punch to be helping out on the BarCamp RDU organizing committee this year.

We put out the call for sponsors a couple of weeks ago and thanks to some generous sponsors including iContact, Canonical, rPath, Brian Russell, OpenNMS and Montie Design we quickly met 65% of our small budget. Now we need to wrap things up, money-wise. If you'd like to get some great positive exposure among the best and brightest in the local tech community by sponsoring, here's your chance.

If you're interested in sponsoring or helping out as a volunteer, contact me via email for more info (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org). If you're interested in attending, you'll have to add your name to the waiting list -- at this point we're sold out.

In case you're not following the Blackbox blog, the Sun Modular Data Center is coming to the Triangle on March 12, 2008. The event will be hosted at the SAS Institute campus in Cary, NC. Here's the blurb:

Join us and enjoy presentations and tours throughout the day of Sun's Modular Datacenter, the world's first datacenter in a box - a 6.1 meter (20 foot) shipping container. Also known as Project Blackbox, this is a virtualized datacenter optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. It applies Sun's trademark innovation and network computing infrastructure expertise to engineer out complexity and provide a whole new alternative for quickly adding datacenter capacity anywhere it's needed, with the ability to move it as business needs change. Because of its modular, high density design, the Sun Modular Datacenter packs more heterogeneous compute power in less space than a traditional datacenter, and can be configured, deployed, and quickly modified and redeployed for another project virtually anywhere worldwide.

Interested? The sign up is here.

We spent most of the day today at the state fair. Kids loved it. Parents endured it. We saw the bunnies, roosters, cows and pigs. We avoided the fried-thing of the year. We used up a fist-full of pre-purchased ride tickets and learned that the dubious safety factor makes the rides much more exciting than the big sturdy ones at the theme parks.

Local multi-media and social software whiz kid Brian Russell is hanging out his shingle as an consultant. Best of luck, Brian. If you're looking to grow an online community or upgrade your organization to Web 2.0, check out his resume and portfolio.

The Raleigh Bloggers meet-up has morphed into a more inclusive RTP/Triangle-wide gathering, not just for bloggers and not just for Raleigh. We're still meeting on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays, but we've moved the location from Raleigh Times Bar to the more centrally located Serena, a nice restaurant/bar with free WIFI. And we've established a community page at Ning. Our first meet-up in this new configuration is tonight so come on down and join us at 6:30PM tonight.

Looks like we're going to have a pretty good turn-out for the Raleigh bloggers meet-up tonight (7PM at Raleigh Times) with Pat Mueller, Jackson Fox, Wayne Sutton, Michael Kimsal and perhaps even Mister Sugar himself planning to show up. That's a little unusual because attendance has been pretty spotty recently. In fact, last time it was just Pat and I sipping pints outside of the Raleigh Times Bar.

Pat proposed that we rename, refocus and relocate the Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. He suggested that we admit our geek nature by renaming it the "RTP Blogging Code Monkeys Meet-up." Also that we move it to the RTP area so it's convenient to folks from all three corners of the Triangle. I'm ready for a change and declining attendance is a drag, so I'm a big +1 on that. I suggested that we be more inclusive to non-bloggers with a blurb like this:

RTP dev/blogger meet-up. Come and chat about software development and web-technologies with Triangle-area code monkeys and bloggers.

Interested? If so, subscribe to the BlogTogether mailing lists for further updates.

In the unlikely event that you are a Triangle area geek who reads this blog and has not yet signed up, you might want to know that registration for BarCamp RDU is open.

Via the Aquarium, there's a nice Java EE and Glassfish adoption story over in Chillboro:

Adam Constabaris: A fundamental question for us in building this application was whether to use Tomcat and "soup it up" by using Spring to add services Tomcat doesn't provide itself, or whether to use a full Java EE container. We could have made it work with the servlet container approach, since our application isn't heavily "enterprisey" and we were initially reluctant to pay the complexity price of EJBs. After looking at the Java EE 5 specification, though, we saw a lot of ways we could simplify and standardize things, such as using JSF 1.2 and coding to the Java Persistence API rather than using Hiberrnate APIs directly.

Hey! I know that guy. Hi Adam.

Is there a trend towards full app servers and away from plain old Tomcat? Is it because of strong open source Java EE offerings from Sun, JBoss and Apache? I don't know, but I sure hope so.

It's meet-up time and as usual, I'll be there. Details - http://joshstaiger.org/raleighbloggers

Via Paul Jones:

RTP 2.0 and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development are proud to present the first RTP 2.0 Social. Sponsored by RTP 2.0, CED, and Broadwick, makers of IntelliContact, this event will be held Wednesday, April 4, from 7-9PM at Tyler’s Tavern in Durham (located in the American Tobacco Campus).

This event is open to everyone interested in meeting other technologists, innovators and entrepreneurs in the area. The goal of RTP 2.0 is to bring individuals together for meeting, sharing ideas, and having fun. Friends are welcome, of course.

Sounds like another nice opportunity to meet-up with the local tech crowd. I just signed up for the mailing list.

We've decided to change the time and place of our Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. Too many folks complained about Tuesday night, so we've moved to the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month. Now we'll find out if "Tuesday's not good for me" was just an excuse to avoid hanging with the tech/geek patrol. And we've moved from crowded and loud Helios Coffee to the quiet Raleigh Times Bar (yeah, right). I mean, if nobody's gonna show up we might as well drink, no?

When: Second and Fourth Wednesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: The Raleigh Times Bar (Map)

14 E Hargett St
Raleigh, NC  27601
919.833.0999

It's time for the first Raleigh Bloggers meetup of the new year.

About Us. We are a group of bloggers who live in and around Raleigh, North Carolina. We meet twice a month at a local coffee shop just to chat. We have no formal agenda. Sometimes we talk about blogging, sometimes podcasting, sometimes technology, sometimes politics, ... mostly whatever's on our minds. We've been meeting regularly since March of 2005.

Join Us! New faces are always welcome, whether you're a professional blogger, a newbie looking for help starting a blog, or someone who just likes to talk about nerdy things. All you have to do is show up and look for a group of guys with laptops (invariably it's always guys, but women are certainly welcome!).

Meetup details are on the wiki.

 
(Helios Coffee. By Raleigh blogger abbyladybug / Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker)

The North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, Saturday, January 20, 2007. This is a free, open and public event for scientists, educators, students, journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in discussing science communication, education and literacy on the Web.

See Bora's blog for an update on sessions, sponsors and ways you can help.