SPARK Talks at the NEPA Tech meet up in December 2017

SPARK Talks are, by definition, Short, Provocative, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Knowledgeable talks that are loosely timed, on a specific topic (more or less), and allow many presentations to be given at an event. I had never heard of them prior to this month’s NEPA Tech meet up organized by John George.

SPARK Talks remind me of Lightning Talks or Ignite. I have been to a few Ignite events – some where very early like this one 10 years ago. The thing I appreciate most about this style of presentation is that many in attendance can be part of the program. In fact, at this particular meet up nearly every single attendee was able to take a few minutes and describe themselves, something they’re currently working on, or a topic of their choice.

Photo: Ted giving his presentation on Rust.

In all there were 15 presenters. I quickly jotted them down as they happened. I didn’t get full names or all of their web sites, but at least I captured something. Here are the presenters and their topics:

John – spoke about becoming an independent developer
Jared – discussed his ambitions of working in real estate
George – described use IoT in industrial industries
Ryan – talked of learning more about computers, the web, to better do his job
Kevin – discussed some of the WhatNow! journey
Beth – spoke of her passion for the environment
Colin (me) – spoke about not getting hung up on decision making, just start
Jason – discussed some of the projects Sho Technology Solutions is working on
Ted – talked about the advantages of Rust
Anthony – educated us on the xAPI
Chris – discussed some of the challenges and next-steps for NEPA Fiber
Danny – showed us a video demo of Kraken Board Sports latest product
Mark – rallied the attendees to contribute to NEPA Tech
Den – discussed his self-taught history of becoming a front-end developer
Gary – discussed eating odd things for his YouTube channel

As you can see the topics were all over the map which helped to keep the evening interesting and the shortness of the presentations moved the event along nicely. I believe NEPA Tech will do events like this again in the future. If so, be sure to contribute. Most of these were fairly unscripted talks so don’t be hesitant.

Thanks to John George for organizing this month’s event. Onto 2018.

December 28, 2017

Attending October’s NEPA.js meet up

On Tuesday, October 10 I attended October’s NEPA.js meet up. John George of NEPA Web Solutions was this month’s presenter and his topic was Bitcoin and the Blockchain: Democratizing How We Exchange Value.

I believe all members of NEPA.js would agree, John’s presentation was arguably the best presentation the meet up group has had to-date. Though the Blockchain can seem a complex topic, John did an excellent job describing how it worked, where it is currently being used, and its future potential. Though the meet up was relatively well attended, I left wishing that so many more people had heard his presentation.

To further the lesson beyond the walls of the Scranton Enterprise Center, John also gave each attendee a gift in the form of a wallet containing a single bit of BTC. He also incentivized attendees to claim that bit for themselves by awarding the first few that did so with $50USD in BTC. Those that did it were rewarded indeed since the value of BTC has jumped to new record highs this month. Those that didn’t claim their bit may be kicking themselves for dragging their feet.

John will likely do this presentation again, in some form, under the NEPA Tech banner. Meet up’s like October’s are what is spurring the group to expand the group into a more general direction. This particular presentation had nothing to do with JavaScript – as the name NEPA.js would have you believe – and so we want to make sure each meet up is approachable by all that would be interested. You may remember me saying this over the last few months, and even in January I spelled it out specifically, but now there has been positive steps towards this happening. We’ll have more to announce in the near future.

Thanks to John for the amazing presentation, and for the bitcoin, and to the attendees for the active discussion.

Side note: My apologies for a terrible pano photo. I’ll try to do better next time.

October 23, 2017

John George shares a solution

John George, fellow NEPA.js attendee:

I’m writing this because I discovered the hard way that .NET Core’s ‘dotnet run’ command is NOT meant to be production ready. My biggest headache was that my website shut down when I exited my shell. Not even the ‘disown’command would dissociate the running service from the user.

Posts like this by John often do not get enough attention. While it may not be applicable to you right now – dozens, hundreds, or perhaps thousands of people searching for this issue over the following months and years will be very glad that John took the time to do the write-up.

Kudos to him. More developers should write about their solutions.

September 14, 2017