Nodebots Take Over

          Having little to no experience with Node.js, anxiety struck as I walked through the massive revolving doors at 1500 Broadway into this months Nodebots event at the about.com headquarters in Times Square. My nerves immediately subsided (with the help of some beer and pizza) as I found out that most of the people who had attended this event were in the same boat as I was, but there were still hardcore Nodebot veterans in the building.

         Nodebots was great because anyone (with javascript experience) can get a good handle on understanding the in's and out's of how their code can be used to control these little "bots". What I loved most about this event was the amount of help that I received from the developers who were hosting the event. A couple of the pioneers of the API 'Johnny-Five' were present, including Rick Waldron. They handed out Arduino hardware to anyone that didn't bring their own to work with.

        The 'Johnny-Five' API is actually what made Node accessible with the Arduino hardware. I began to realize how easy it was to use and understand 'Johnny-Five' as I read through their app on GitHub. With some help, I was able to get a potentiometer to control how fast an LED light was able to blink as well as control the rotation of a servo solely with javascript. As amazing as my accomplishments seem to be, they came nowhere close to what was going on at the table behind me. Some guy was working on wirelessly controlling some sort of robot on wheels from his laptop with Node, and thats not even the full potential of what the 'Johnny-Five' API can do with this sort of hardware.
        As the night came to an end Rick Waldron sat next to me and began to explain what sort of things his team is working on. My jaw dropped when he showed me a youtube video of one of his partners presenting a spider-like-robot that can be controlled by just waving your hand over some sort of sensor. The sensor picks up all sorts of hand gestures that manipulate its movement in some sort of way.
        This months Nodebots was most definitely a success. Everybody who attended learned something new and more importantly had a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to seeing when the next Nodebot is going to go down.

24 Pull Requests

This week was round two for GCM at Huge Inc., the incredibly communally active web design firm in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

This event, named 24 Pull Requests, was a part of a larger event taking place (I think) the world over. The purpose of the 24PR is to promote giving back to the open source community by submitting a pull request as a gift during December every day leading up to Christmas.

As always, Huge came through tremendously in the food department. There was a little bit of stir when the floor above us started leaking water everywhere (The third floor has been under construction since before the last time GCM visited.), but it was quickly taken care of.

There were perhaps 15 developers there to work, about 5 of whom were actually bringing their project in hopes of finding some new people to help build their open source education platform. (Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a name). People worked from about 6pm - 10pm with tacos and beer. All in all, a good night of hacking.

This event has inspired me to make an effort to focus a bit more on the open source community for this blog, so expect to see another group of meetups added to the "Regulars" page above sometime soon.

EDIT - We were able to work for a while with a really cool guy named Michael Kolodny who is working on building a website to help ease the apartment hunting process. I think it has some potential to be a really great service. If you know someone who's going to be moving soon, let them know about Janther. 

My First Event

Earlier today Lauren Schuhmacher posted a review of "The Digital Currency Round Table". There she provided, hopefully, an unbiased analysis of the event and what went right/wrong. Now I'm here to tell you what it was like planning it. It should be mentioned, however, that this wasn't your standard monthly meetup. I had been working on this event with CoinApex and we're hoping to do something of the sort again next semester.

Advertising:

We got really lucky here. The incredibly capable Andy Johnson of CoinApex designed some kickass advertising for us. Not only did we have a great poster and post cards around campus, but he also put up a great site at digitalcurrencyroundtable.com!

Speakers:

Connections are key here. The only reason this event happened is because I was able to get an introduction to the board of CoinApex. If I had not been given that introduction, then I seriously doubt I would have been able to pull this event together.

I met with Alex Waters and Sarah Tyre, they loved the idea I pitched, and the rest was just those two calling their friends and getting them involved! Getting quality speakers is really a connections game.

You can find bios on the speakers at the website posted above.

Food:

I made a mistake here. We did fine with the amount, but unfortunately I forgot to announce that people should go get some before the event started! We got going with the discussion before a box had even been opened!

Overshoot on amount, and be SURE people know the food is available!

Setup:

Most likely your venue will be able to set things up for you before the event, but make sure you've contacted them about this. I've had friends who forgot to do this and just assumed that the venue would take care of it, and when they showed up before the event nothing was ready. Be sure you know what you need, and make this list clear to the venue.

Attendees:

There are a lot of opinions on how you should how about getting attendees. In this instance I chose to offer free pizza for the students, and CoinApex sent out a media alert to their network, as well as a few email blasts to their mailing lists.

We also chose to stream the event in an effort to provide accessibility to those who couldn't attend (we got a lot of views on this).

Followup:

We are currently working on followup now. All the speakers we invited are receiving packets of our marketing material with a hand written note thanking them for their participation. In addition to this we are sending a packet to individuals we are hoping to have speak in the future.

The Digital Currency Round Table

On Wednesday, November 19, The King's College Programming Club hosted a digital currency round table debate in conjunction with NYC-based CoinApex. The debate, moderated by PaymentsSource reporter Bailey Reutzel, illuminated some of the major concerns, roadblocks, and advantages of Bitcoin for an audience of students, faculty, and New Yorkers with an interest in digital currency.

Participants were Alex Waters, CEO of CoinApex; Ryan Strauss, chair of the Payments Practice Group at Riddell Williams P.S. in Seattle and commercial lawyer; and Robert Adler, who is building one of the first Bitcoin hedge funds.

The discussion started with a question submitted in advance: "Is Bitcoin going to the moon?" The prompt, as quaint as it was poignant, allowed the panel to begin their discussion by considering the possibilities for Bitcoin as it continues to develop. It's only reasonable for us to wonder how great digital currency is going to be—and if it is going to the moon, we might want to get in on it.

The idea of wanting a piece of Bitcoin and its success transitioned the conversation into one of regulation. The debate stayed on regulation for a while, and there was some resistance from Adler regarding the utility of a regulation discussion: he argued that the panel would better serve the audience by discussing the possibilities that Bitcoin allows, so that the students specifically could see digital currency as a means to experience and create cool things. While there is certainly something to be said for the possibilities of Bitcoin, Waters and Strauss countered Adler's comments by arguing that a conversation about the possibilities of Bitcoin is useless without also discussing the regulation in place. What someone has to do with Bitcoin inevitably informs what someone can do with Bitcoin.

The discussion, I think, was most well-suited for audience members that had at least a small working knowledge of Bitcoin technology. Occasionally, the speakers would ask the audience if they needed an explanation of certain point—like the Blockchain, for example—and audience members would shout, "yes!" and the speakers would explain. Those moments were informative for listeners who entered the debate as novices to Bitcoin, but the majority of the content was interesting to people who came because they already knew about digital currency.

Because the debate ended only because it had to—we ran out of time, but not out of conversation—I think there's good reason to assume another event like this would be well-received. I'm sure that everyone who left the debate took an opinion about Bitcoin's future. Maybe it is going to the moon. 

—Lauren Schuhmacher

Spooky EmberJS October Meetup

This Thursday the EmberJS NYC meetup gathered over free pizza and beer (provided very kindly by Pivotal Labs). The AngularJS meetup is also often hosted here at Pivotal, and I have to say they're really phenominal hosts. There's always someone there to take care of all the AV for the meetup, and providing an open space for the various development communities to meet is really a great thing for the NYC developer culture.

While I've never used Ember myself, it was really great getting to know more about the JavaScript community here in NYC.

This meetup was organized into two sections. The first was a series of three lightning talks:

1. Gaurav Munjal - Gaurav spoke about a new ember CLI tool he is working on that integrates JQuery UI seamlessly.
2. Katie Gengler - Katie is the CTO of funding Gates. She presented on a few concepts that are pretty fundamental to the way Ember works, yet are either poorly documented or difficult to find resources for.
3. Nik Nyby - Presented on a game he is working on that is meant to demonstrate the effects of climate change to students. While the game is currently just operating in an excel spreadsheet, he is hoping to move it to a browser extension. You can find his source code here: https://github.com/ccnmtl/wacep

The final presentation of the night was a full length presentation by Luke Melia named "Spooky Ember". Luke is the founder of the EmberJS meetup in NYC, and his talk tonight was focused on exploring some of the more esoteric corners of Ember. 

The initial lightening talks went well, though they were a bit of a bore. There was a brief break taken for the audience to grab more pizza and a second beer. After a little bit of chatting, the lights in the room went dark. Everyone was a little confused, and, suddenly, a cloaked figure, bound in chains, came shuffling across the front of the room. His raspy voice echoed over the sound system. Luke Melia had arrived to give his halloween Ember talk.

The crowd was entirely drawn in. Luke is an expert speaker and, after a few ghostly jokes, and a pun or two about eating the brains of those who volunteered to answer his questions, we were treated to 45 minutes of very educational lecture with a wonderful amount of crowd involvement.

One of the best things about living in NYC is that we have the opportunity to participate in these communities and learn things with a group of people that we would have no chance to otherwise. If you live in a city where meetups are a common thing, then I definitely recommend you find one on a topic you'd like to learn more about. If you get lucky, it might be led by someone like Luke.