Posted 10/25/2013

Just finished attending and speaking at the first ever All Things Open conference. It was a great first time event in Raleigh, NC. There were over 800 people registered. The format was split into 4 tracks, Development, Operations, Business, and Emerging. Each talk was 45 minutes long and there were plenty to choose from. Most talks, that I was able to attend were informative and constructive. Unfortunately, I only got to hear one keynote. From the Redhat CIO.

RedHat Keynote

It is truly amazing that Redhat has been open for 20 years and is a billion a year revenue giant, all based on open source and the support and services of open source software. They are in the process of moving as much of their IT to the cloud, and plan to be about 80% in the cloud in 2 years. From what I know, they do a great job of interacting and working with the open source communities. I few months ago, I had the honor to speak at the Fedora conference and the Redhat interaction was phenominal. Looking forward to seeing how they transition from tranditional IT to the Cloud and the future.

AngularJS/EmberJS Talks

On the second day of the event, there were two back to back talks on AngularJS (my talk) and EmberJS. The feedback I got was both talks went well and much of the audience was very excited to be able to look at both technologies in the same time frame. The EmberJS session had about 15 minutes of excellent QA. Trek did a great job presenting EmberJS and its focus to be the full stack. And the AngularJS framework is more flexible, but asks the developer to make more decisions about the application architecture. It seemed to me that the audience got the pros and cons of both very well.

Having fun with Neo4J

Mark Gunnels gave a talk on Neo4J and the Cipher language, the power of graph databases is just being realized and Mark did a great job of keeping the talk high level and understandable. I am very excited about this new type of NoSQL database, because it offers a one to one conceptual approach to database architecture, especially for analysis. One audience member brought up a great idea about creating an import tool to convert data from SQL Databases to a graph database. That could be a fun side project to work on. The graph structure of the Avengers was a great way to visualize the relationship structure as well as how to query/walk the graph.

NodeJS

Jeremy Martin from Sparc gave an excellent talk on NodeJS concerning the past, present and future of async patterns in NodeJS. ES6 Generators are very interesting. Jeremy also introduced his module called suspend to improve the async headache. The funniest part of the talk was where Jeremy showed a slide stating that Isaacs the leader of the NodeJS code base was changing the core to embed promises. Then he quickly changed the slide to a just kidding. It is well known that the core team has no plans of breaking backwards compatibility to embed promises. It will just break to many older programs and goes aganist their philosophy.