Como Rich Web Group

Apr 18

May Meetup - PhoneGap and Task Queues!

May's meetup is on Wednesday, May 16th! Here's the scoop: it will be hosted at our usual Museao location (directions). Talks start at 6:00pm but come by around 5:30pm or so if you want to hang out beforehand.

Building Touch Apps with Web Technologies

By: Luke Daffron

About the talk:

If you are already familiar with HTML5, Javascript, and JQuery - you have most of the tools you need to write "native" apps for iOS and Android. If nothing else, it can help you build a really fast cross-platform prototype or V1. I'll take you through how I developed an app with JQuery Mobile and PhoneGap Build, and share some tips along the way.

Task Queues in Python, Ruby and More!

By: Bryan Helmig

About the talk:

Task Queues are efficient ways to perform important things in the background instead of introducing delays for the user. Primarily, we'll cover identifying use cases and architecture, but we'll also dig down into Python's Celery, Ruby's Resque, and touch on some simple "home grown" queue systems.

About Our Speakers

Luke:

Luke Daffron works locally for Foliotek, Inc and can be found as "LJD" on the AppStore. He moved to Columbia from St. Joseph to go to MU, and was hired by LANIT Consulting after college. He survived the company's "consulting era" to help launch and support their namesake project. He's had a couple side projects along the way (Choosik.com first, now Big League Wiffle Ball mobile apps). He's a man-of-many-hats - splitting time between programming, usability work/testing, analytics/seo/split testing, project planning, and mentoring.

Bryan:

Bryan Helmig is a Missouri native and self taught hacker. By day he is the only Python/Django dev at Veterans United and by night he wrestles the backend that makes Zapier go. You can also find him on twitter as @bryanhelmig.

Mar 27

April Meetup - Newsy and Pushbutton Web

April's meetup is on Wednesday, April 18th! You know the drill: it will be hosted at our usual Museao location (directions). Talks start at 6:00pm but come by around 5:30pm or so if you want to hang out beforehand.

Newsy

Presented By: Tyten Teegarden and Geoff Pado

Summary:

Newsy develops eight apps across eight platforms. While these are cool, cooler still are the unseen apps being developed to be used by the people who produce our videos.

Tyten and Geoff will stop by to talk a little bit about Newsy's different mobile apps and then go into detail about some pretty neat stuff they've been working on for internal use at Newsy. There are web and iOS components to these projects and his partner Geoff will showcase the web side while Tyten shows host the iOS app ties into it.

About the speaker:

Tyten Teegarden is a Missouri native who works as Mobile App Development Manager at Newsy while moonlighting operating his own LLC. He is most proficient in iOS but has some experience in web/database work as well as Android and Windows Phone.

Pushbutton Web
Presented By: Ryanne Dolan

Summary:

Pushbutton Web is like SMS messages for your webpages. It enables content providers to send realtime push-notifications directly to browsers or mobile apps using HTTP.

About the speaker:

Ryanne Dolan is a CS lecturer at the University of Missouri. His courses can be found on his site: http://www.ryannedolan.info/teaching.

Mar 7

March Meetup: Hadoop+HBase and Backbone.js

We have a great meetup planned this month for Wednesday, March 21st! This will be hosted at our usual Museao location (directions). Talks start at 6:00pm but come by around 5:30pm or so if you would like to socialize beforehand.

High Performance Messaging with RabbitMQ

James Carr will be presenting on rabbitMQ, messaging patterns, and why using databases for messaging generally sucks.

Haddop and HBase for Managing Big Data

First up we have John Riley, Principal Consultant of Incite Retail who will be sharing with us his experiences with Haddop and HBase for Managing Big Data:

Big Data quite simply swamps Traditional database & Data Warehouse architectures. In the Big Data age now breaking upon us, the sheer volume, velocity, and variety of information content now operant in the application space required a new class of technologies and approaches. Hadoop & Hbase have arrived, been put to long use and tested under the most stringent conditions by major social media & retail concerns.

John Riley brings decades of engineering and consulting experience in aerospace, manufacturing, healthcare, biotechnology, and finance from engagements in the US and Europe. Prior to Incite Retail, John worked at Elan Pharmaceuticals developing work flow and data processing pipelines on large datasets. Currently, John provides thought leadership in the consulting practice focusing on data transformation, modeling, and serialization of data into Hadoop, HBase, and Hive.

Backbone.js at Zapier

And then after all the heavy hitting Hadoop and Big Data talk Mike Knoop will give a bit of a lighter talk on Backbone.js at Zapier:

Backbone.js is a javascript micro-framework which really propels the idea of “web apps” instead of “web pages”. At Zapier, we are using Backbone and similar technologies to write a fast, modular, and complex frontend system which our customers use to create and interact with Zaps. Our frontend is constantly challenged to convey the complex notion of linking business web applications together using APIs -- and we are using Backbone to achieve that goal. Other talking points include Backbone SEO, Backbone performance, Backbone architecture guidelines and using Backbone with RequireJS.

Mike Knoop is a Mechanical Engineering graduate student at the University of Missouri. From Wildwood, Missouri, he moonlights as a co-founder of Zapier hacking on Backbone, Cofeescript, and Sass. In past lives he has been seen as a Facebook Forum Moderator, writer for InsideFacebook.com, and Z80 assembly programmer for the TI-83/84 calculator series.

Come join us on the 21st! We will have a good mix of topics and it is a great place to meet up with web developers, designers, and entrepreneurs in Columbia.

Feb 3

February Meetup - Amazon Web Services and Finding Niche Networks

We have a great meetup planned this month for Wednesday, February 15th! This will be hosted at the usual Museao location (directions). The talks start at 6:00, but come by around 5:30 or so if you want to socialize beforehand.

Note: Follow @ComoRichWeb on Twitter for updates before meetings. Also, tweet #comorichweb before the meetup to win raffle drawings at the meetup!

Amazon Web Services - Ted Han

Ted Han (@knowtheory) is going to talk about some of the work he has done using Amazon Web Services at DocumentCloud. Here is the gist:

DocumentCloud hosts its servers through Amazon Web Services. The
choice of AWS along side some architecture constraints has allowed
DocumentCloud to respond to unexpected demand with very little
additional work. And where additional work has been necessary AWS's APIs have allowed us to provision resources quickly and easily. I'll be doing a quick overview of AWS and the features that DocumentCloud has relied upon.

A little more about Ted: He is a linguist by degree, software developer by trade and a scifi & video game nerd by leisure. Visit his blog at http://blog.knowtheory.net/.

Finding Niche Networks - Scott Wendling

Scott Wendling (@commercialscott) from PenginSpark Social Marketing talk about finding niche networks. Here's what he has to say about his talk:

New social networks are popping up everyday. Networks for pictures, videos, bookmarking, gaming, and even networks to promote networks. Finding the niche network that fits you can have huge benefits to your overall networking and marketing. But choose the wrong one and you waste valuable time. Learn how to filter the noise and identify the networks that will work best for you.

A little more about Scott: He is a social media logistics expert that implements and manages social marketing for companies. He uses a symbiotic approach that integrates and builds upon existing marketing strategies. In addition to consulting businesses he manages social media aspects of political campaigns, provides classes for state associations, and coordinated the '#CoMoFlashmob' for the Google Fiber to the Home competition.

Come join us on the 15th! We will have a good mix of topics and it is a great place to meet up with web developers, designers, and entrepreneurs in Columbia.

Jan 11

January Meetup - Twitter Bootstrap and PyroCMS

Come join us for the first meetup of 2012 on Tuesday, January 17th at Museao (directions). Talks start at 6:00, but come by around 5:30 or so if you want to socialize beforehand.

We have two great talks planned, so come out on Tueday!

PyroCMS - Jerel Unruh

Jerel is a core contributor for PyroCMS. He also designed the ComoRichWeb logo you see above! Here's what he is going to be talking about:

PyroCMS is a modular and open source content management system buildon the CodeIgniter php framework. I will speak on "An Introduction to PyroCMS" in which I will explain where PyroCMS can be used, give an overview of how developers can write modules for it, and how designers can easily create themes for it.

Twitter Bootstrap - James Carr

Next, James Carr will be presenting on Twitter Bootstrap:

Twitter Bootstrap is described on the site as "Bootstrap is a toolkit
from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables,
grids, navigation, and more." In this presentation I'll go over the
different components and javascript behaviors the toolkit brings to
make beautiful looking web apps quickly and painlessly while also
exploring some of the user contributed addons for it

See you there!

P.S. Sorry about the schedule change, we are working on moving back to 3rd Wednesday going forward.

Nov 2

November Meetup - Chrome Developer Tools and C#

The November meetup is coming soon! It is going to happen in two weeks on Wednesday, November 16th at 6PM. We will be meeting at the usual Museao location, which is awesome. The snacks and beer and good company will starting around 5:30, and the talks will start at 6.

Talks

Brian Grinstead will be talking about Chrome Developer tools, covering a brief overview of modern in-browser debugging and inspecting, then dig into some of the tricks that can save a lot of time when working with html/css/javascript.

In a first for the ComoRichWeb group, Luke Daffron is going to show us the ropes with C#. There are some really neat features here, like LINQ. Also, did you know you can run this platform on Linux or OS X with the open source Mono framework?

See you there!

Please follow ComoRichWeb on twitter and let anyone who might be interested in the group know about us. Also, don't forget to tweet #comorichweb for a chance to win prizes at the November meetup!

Future Meetings

We are planning a special event for December, and are also looking for talks for future months. If there is a particular topic that you want to share with the group, please contact us!

Some things that would be great to hear about would be creating voice and SMS enabled sites using something like Twilio, using Twitter Bootstrap and/or HTML5 Boilerplate as a starting point for projects, different queuing systems for background processing, or anything else that you think is interesting.

Filed under // meetup

Oct 12

Next Meetup October 19th : Startup Weekend and More

Wow... October has flown by and our next meetup has snuck up on me! Our next meetup will be Wednesday October 19th and Museao.

This month we're going to have a few of the developers who participated in Startup Weekend share their experiences, technology stack, and how to get a functional prototype up and running within a weekend. We also have a few lightning talks lined up if time allows.

This month we'll have our raffle again with ebook certificates from O'Reilly and Manning as well as JetBrains licenses. Just tweet #comorichweb to be eligible.

We'll be meeting at Museao at the usual times... 5:30 for drinks and light socialization and the meeting officially starts at 6:00pm. See you there!!

Sep 14

New Group: Hacks/HackersIRE

There's a new group in town called Hacks/HackersIRE that will have it's first meetup on the 21st. Here's a short blurb describing the first meetup:

Hacks/HackersIRE welcomes Jeremy Ashkenas to town to talk (q&a style) about his work on DocumentCloud, as well as some higher level discussion on software for a civic cause. We'll also do some introductions and some game type things just as a way to spark conversation between the Hacks (journalists) and Hackers (devs). People are of course more than welcome to come and leave as they please (we are hosting the meetup at a bar after all!).

Things kick off at 7pm at the Broadway Brewery, Wed Sept 21st.

So this month you can get a triple dose of technology. First Strange Loop conference in St. Louis, Hacks/HackersIRE on the 21st, and then ComoRichweb NoSQL Smackdown on the 28th!

Sep 10

Next Meetup: NoSQL Smackdown September 28th!

Summer is over, school is back in session, and soon our next ComoRichWeb meetup will be upon us starting at 5:30 Wednesday September 28th at Museao.

This month we'll have a smattering of presentations on some of the popular NoSQL databases out there that should give you a good idea of what is out there that you can quickly dump MySQL (or egads! Oracle!) for. :)

Here's the night's lineup:

Clint Shryock will give a talk on Riak.

Ben Griffith will discuss MongoDB (which my smart phone always corrects as Mongolian ER).

Brian Cooksey will give rundown on Redis.

Finally, James Carr will give an overview of CouchDB

Whew... that's a lot of talks. And each of them are clocked in at 90 minutes each! Just kidding... they're not going to be anywhere near that long and it should be an interesting foray into the different NoSQL databases available for use in your projects.

This month's meetup will be held at Museao and as the same with last month you're welcome to show up around 5:30 for drinks, casual discussion and socialization with the meetup officially beginning at 6pm.

As always, we'll have a few give aways from our sponsors, from print books, ebooks, intelliJ licenseses and much more! Just remember to tweet #comorichweb in the days leading up to the meetup.

See you there!