Attended NIC-U Mini-Conference

The NIC-U mini-conference, hosted by Near Infinity and organized by my friend, Gray Herter, was a great success today. They had talks on HTML 5, Rails 3.0, the Sproutcore JavaScript library and Android development, plus lightning talks. A truly fun event, augmented by some awesome food (Uncle Julio’s Mexican Restaurant catered the dinner).

Announcing DevIgnition

I’m one of the organizers of the new DevIgnition Conference, which will be held December 3, 2010 at the Oracle building in Reston, VA. Tickets will be released to prospective attendees on Monday, October 18th.

MetroStar on SunnyConf

Here’s a very nice write-up from MetroStar Systems regarding my latest speaking engagement at SunnyConf in Phoenix, AZ.

Note: The link has been removed because the relevant blog entry is no longer available.

NOVARUG Rails/Facebook Talk

I’ll be giving my “Leveraging Rails to Build Facebook Apps, Version 2.0” talk at the NovaRUG meeting on September 15th. This version of the talk incorporates the recent changes that Facebook has made to its developer ecosystem. It will also be videotaped by the incomparable Don Anderson, although the talk won’t be available online until after I’ve given the talk at SunnyConf in Phoenix, AZ.

GSA Competitions and Prizes Industry Day

I attended the GSA’s Competitions and Prizes Industry Day yesterday, an event designed to facilitate President Obama’s mandate for using contests and prizes to spur innovation, transparency and collaboration within government. Contests represent an exciting application space, and I was pleased to be able to talk to folks about our Votridea Contest Platform.

Speaking at SunnyConf

SunnyConfI just received word today that I was accepted as a speaker for SunnyConf, Arizona’s first Ruby conference, which will be held September 25, 2010. I’ll be giving a talk on “Leveraging Rails to Build Facebook Applications.” This is version 2.0 of the talk, incorporating major changes that were announced by Facebook at their F8 conference in April.

RubyNation Contest

It looks like RubyNation will be doing an online photo contest using the Votridea Online Contest Platform (which I helped create). I’ll post more news as it becomes available.

Votridea.com Launches!

My team’s been working for months now on the Votridea Online Video Contest Platform, and it just soft-launched today. The platform can do video and photo contests, is cloud-based, fully-scalable and robust (since it’s based on the real-world experiences we got running international contests for the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs).