Tag Archives: barcamp

Barcamp 2 – more from Friday night

Gave my talk on branding for startups.   Discussed the Three R’s of branding and some of the particular issues of note for a young company trying to get established in an Internet driven economy.

Then I went late to a talk on the Erlang programming language.  It was standing room only so live-blogging wasn’t practical.   Cool talk though.   The big idea here:  Erlang is massively scalable!  The rest was over my head 🙂

Now I’m in a talk on Bayesian algorithms for filtering – two groups combined for this talk, one interested in Bayesian analysis the other in AI and cognition (with a futurist spin).  Thought this would be a more philosophical discussion because of the AI, but the Bayesians have numbers on their side so the talk is getting into logic and algorithms.   Spam filtering is a popular problem for applying the power of Bayesian.  Basically by recognizing user behaviors and aggregating  behaviors across users and then create probabilities for saving and for scrubbing any particular message.   So Bayesian calculations get the probablities that score likelihood of scrub and likelihood of save.   Then another algorithm has to look at the balance between the scores to determine the final save/scrub decision.  The goal is to have a system that continues to learn over time to get better over time.  Surprise issue – you don’t want the system to learn too fast!  If it does the system can develop biases that might move you away from desirable result.   Learning at the right pace allows the system to aggregate enough scores to have more relevant outcomes.

What does this have to do with branding?   As I mentioned an hour or so ago, I’m indulging my nerdy roots and hanging out at Barcamp Atlanta.   The technology is driving everything these days.  And I believe in the long run these technologies will influence marketing and buying behaviors, just like the web has.

Moderating is discussing filtering large data sets – question now about qualifying market data as another use case.  Bayesian is good at putting info into buckets.  Not as good for mathematical evaluation.

Could you use Bayesian to create real estate recomendations? Start learning behavior for a home buyer? Could the home buyer train the system fast enough to make it useful infiltering a databse of 100000 homes?  (questions from Alan Pinstein)  The experts say yes, this is a good application for Bayesian approach.

Conversation is moving to relevance engines, but it is 10pm so time to change rooms.

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Barcamp 2 – the sequel

I can’t believe it has been a year since the first Atlanta Barcamp!  And for you folks saying “What’s Barcamp?”  You’ll just have to bear with me for a little while.  Yes, i’m a branding guy now, but I have nerdy roots and Barcamp is a wonderfully nerdy event.

Right now we are in the ATDC space at Ga Tech.  We’ve been fed some BBQ, sodas and beer and now the evening sessions are beginning.   The format is “unconference” or more appropriately ad hoc conference.  People sign up on a sheet to give presentations, and other people sign up to attend presentations.  The topics vary widely.  From heavy-duty coding topics, to business issues for developers and entrepreneurs, to fun things like demos with liquid nitrogen.   I’m sitting in on a session on pricing for independent consultants – generally meaning programmers for hire, but I’m sure much of it will be applicable for any consultant.

Brad Gilreath of Mapicurious.com is presenting.   Right now he is giving some of the nitty-gritty of a consultants life. Short and long projects, realities of working stamina, finding a balance, hiring help etc.

Oh and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m live-blogging this, meaning I’m writing on the fly while Brad talks, so the style of this post migt be a bit rough ’round the edges than my usual fare — and may get a bit techier.  As I said before, indulge me.

Big point – consultants need sleep too!   Even though the fear of not having a steady gig can turn you into a workaholic.   How much of your day is really usable, billable?

Uh oh, he’s showing a spreadsheet – my eyes are too old and tired for that.  It is a calculator for types of activities and projects.   Discussing pressure applied by clients to make your work appear to be a commodity to drive prices down.

Spreadsheet buld “product factors” to trap client requirements.  Clarify scope, details and particulars. Map payment cycles – build in adjustments for lengthier payment cycles – cost of sitting waiting for your money should be figured into your pricing.

The whole idea here is to have a solid tool for building estimates for projects.   Understanding components and details help guide the discussion for more accurate pricing and heading off potential points of confusion before they become issues or disputes.

This approach could be used as a job auction tool.  Also potential for branding the tool for particular clients.   Weighted average factor pricing could be made tighter with input from accountant/economist.

It could also automatically build documentation for the statement of work.

Guideline – don’t get greedy!

Cool job Brad!

OK – now, depending on how many people signed up, I’m going to give a 1/2 hour on branding for startups.

Can’t blog and talk though 🙂

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About my Barcamp Atlanta posts

This is just a quick note to anyone confused by the flurry of posts I’ve put online recently.  Barcamp Atlanta was a two day event hosted at the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech.  It was a great event gather approximately 100 hundred computer programmers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, investors, sponsors, and web developers.  The format was to not have a format – anyone who came could sign up to lead a session and participation was highly encouraged.  Some sessions were very discussion-oriented, others were powerpoint-centric.  Lots of great information and smart people and a generous attitude toward sharing info.

I tried to capture in a few blog posts, a fraction of the information that washed over me in the sessions I attended.  The writing is rough and loose – a necessity of the situation (and my trying to keep up despite my tortoise-like typing speed).  I paraphrased heavily, quoted where I could, and opined here and there without remorse. One thing you should know is that I am not a subject matter expert in any of the areas that I blogged about, so I almost certainly got some things wrong – the mistakes are mine not the presenters and I welcome comments that will provide any appropriate corrections.

Many shout-outs are deserved by those who put this event together and to those who took the reins and led sessions.  And to the sponsors who fed us!  I don’t know ’em all, but here’s a few I can thank: Jeff,  Stephen, Sanjay, Cooper, Michael I., Logan, Mike  S., Rusty, Amber, Tim, Sandro, Dave, Lance, et al.   Thanks for a great weekend!

Now back to my usual blog topics of branding, marketing, social media, etc.

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Not-Live from Barcamp – Day 2 – Session 6 [for me] Future of Democracy – Social Media

Presenter: Tim Moenk

OK at this point I was getting tired — hitting the Barcamp ceiling for information absorption.  Also the room was packed and awkward for typing in so here’s a post-session recap:

Tim presents some thoughts on the quad-umverate of Social Software, Gaming, Law, and UI.  Basically he contends that the increasing wave of social media is causing fundamental changes in how we interact at a national and global level.  Game designers are becoming social architects, and that law is lagging behind the progress, but there are experiments to try and catch up in areas such as patents.  He also points out that we are capable of self-organizing in a reasonable manner as evidenced by events like Barcamp.

I personally think he raises some very interesting points and wish there had been room in the time allotted for some Q&A. It is a very meaty subject, but I do think Tim was stretching the term Law over not just laws, but also things like etiquette, and governance.  This made for some oversimplifications, IMHO, in some of his statements.  Nonetheless, I’d love the chance to follow up with Tim and talk more about how he sees these vectors impacting our collective futures.

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Live from Barcamp – Day 2 – Session 5 [for me] Facebook apps 101

Presenter: Sandro Turriate

Whoa! – a real presentation with slides and everything!
The paraphrase:
Sandro new to facebook, relatively.
It’s a platform — you write plug-ins
It’s viral.  There is some funding happening, it’s easy to install.

3 steps to app interaction:
1. Facebook contacts appserver
2. App server uses facebook api
3. App server sends response

Sandro wrote a haiku sharing app: “Global haiku”

Your web app can use facebook api to update fb users’ profiles.

How do people find your app – through mini-feed and news feed — also goes into the master list of applications

Getting started:
Install developer facebook application — get from developer.facebook.com — let’s you add applications and check usage, etc.

Lengthy form to fill out to be allowed to develop apps.  you get an API key, a secret key and you have to provide a callback URL — you host your application.

Facebook makes a call back to your url : apps.facebook.com/yourapp – maps to a url on your server

Where does app live:   Facebook caches the info stored in peoples’ profiles, and the callbacks, but the rest is in your world

Facebook, has an idea of a “canvas page” – this is the area for where your application responses get rendered within facebook.   Options for presenting information fbml or iframe — iframe gives you complete control — more cpu intensive – makes more calls to facebook – more bandwidth heavy.  FBML – facebook markup language — special tags from Facebook that facebook will automatically process.  less overhead in using fbml.
There are other things you can access like sidebar feeds, special boxes, things that live within the profile.

Accessing css:  you can do inline styles as attributes or declare style in top of your code.  You can reference an external style sheet through an fbml tag.

Gotchas: Some fbml tags won’t allow random html – didn’t render correctly
<fb:editor> easy to write – but hard to customize
<fb:redirect> useful after POSTs

500 errors — not pretty, not much info.  Anytime you are looking at a facebook app you can view source and see all html rendered (for developers only)

All decision processing happens on your server all input and output happens on facebook.

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Live from Barcamp – Day 2 – Session 4 [for me] Ruby on Rails panel

Looks like just two panelists.  Didn’t get the names.

Starting discussion with scaling issues of mongrel server.  I was expecting more of a discussion of rails, pros and cons, this seems to be more of a discussion of memory use on the server and scalability.  Database load failed to scale for Twitter, sooner than the ability to run enoug instances of mongrel.  Logan, jumps in and interjects “F*ck scalability”  with the contention that when you have the problem of scalability you better have money coming in and can then deal with the issue.   Is Ruby creating a brain-drain on Java talent.  Still more jobs for java developers?   There is a rebutting point that sometimes an app can catch fire before monetization and can outpace the scalability of Rails.  PHP might be better.  But how do you anticipate rate of acceptance, and usage growth?  In one company, not named, prototyping is done in rails, but all that code is tossed for the production environment. The prototyping is useful for creating real requirements, but in the company referred to it is all java for the production.

Lookup: panelist mentioned a video on building a blog app in rails in 15 minutes – assume this can be found on youtube

Panelist expresses difficulty in his experience getting separate rails apps to communicate well.  Not well-suited task for rails.  Application growth tends to get unmanageable.  Not just a rails problem.  Michael chimes in with a plug for Ruby and reinforcing the point that Rails is not very ruby-like.  Learning and loving Ruby can enrich the experience and open new doors.  Very expressive.  Syntax for ruby is very expressive.  Ruby is fully object-oriented.

Rails vs. Symfony — Symfony is a framework for php that borrows much from rails — panelists likes rails much better — more nuance, better unit testing.  Other frameworks, like Zend, etc.  don’t provide the full simplicity, but they do help put you in a better paradigm for development.

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