Head of Developer Experience & Relations at Hookdeck
I joined Pusher around over a month ago now and it's been a non-stop whirlwind of activity. On my first day I was in Poland at Falsy Values for a JavaScript conference and at the same time I was putting together an article for .net magazine . The article is now in the August edition (issue 217) and it got a massive 5 page spread (must be all the pictures).
At the beginning of 2011 we reported that Collect had decided to drop it's API in order to change their offering to something more profitable. But now ReadWriteWeb have reported the disappointing demise of Collecta . This has the potential of being the first big failure of a well funded real-time web focused company, so questions need to be asked about why this happened and why Collecta weren't successful. Back in January of this year we asked " Is It Finally the End for Real-time Search Engines?" and it now looks like that very question is being raised again.
I spent the majority of last week in Warsaw at Falsy Values where I attended a Games Workshop and a conference day. It was also my first week working as a Developer Evangelist working for Pusher . A big and exciting week all round.
If you follow me on Twitter or if I've met up with you in the past few weeks you'll probably know, or have guessed the news. I'm leaving Kwwika, and have joined Pusher . Whilst it's disappointing to leave a project that I've spent the last one year and three months on behind, the move to Pusher couldn't have happened without it.
PubSubHubbub has become the standard protocol for real-time RSS and Atom feed subscription and delivery. But not everybody wants to host their own PubSubHubbub hub in the same way that hardly anybody hosts their own website, and why cloud services in general have become so popular. Guzzle Ayup has entered the market to offer a [...]
A couple of nights ago I want to a Dundee Web Standards event. The events are organised by Chris Leckie and has been running since around October 2010. I've attended once before to see Chris Mills of Opera give a talk on HTML 5 so this was only my second time at a DWS event which is held once a month at Braes, Perth Road, Dundee .
On Saturday I went to DDD Scotland for the first time and really enjoyed myself. Not only were there some really good talks on a range of subjects but the it was great to meet people I interact with on Twitter and make new connections. I managed my schedule for the day using a mobile app created for DDD Scotland by the recently formed Level Up .
I'm a .NET guy and I'm excited and interested in cutting edge technologies. I've found the lack of a .NET community (particularly in Scotland) and not seeing enough developers who primarily using Microsoft technologies getting involved with tech communities really frustrating . My feeling is that there aren't a lot of regular .NET events or general tech meetups involving .NET. This is for a number of reasons; bad feeling towards Microsoft, difficult access to Microsoft technologies due to cost and Microsoft's undoubted focus on enterprise to name but a few. With the exception of Aberdeen techmeetup (due to all the Oil companies up there) the majority of developers at techmeetup events don't seem to be using Microsoft technologies. That doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't the developers - my feeling is that they just don't go to those sorts of things. Techmeetup Edinburgh, Refresh Edinburgh and Techmeetup Glasgow is full of non-MS guys.
The number of “as a Service” types continues to grow and we are even seeing services that help you build your own service. PublishMyData falls into this category as it offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which enables you to offer your Data as a Service (DaaS). The company's focus is to help those with data share it in a standard format and in an accessible way.
SXSW was the source of a flood of real-time information on the web. Information flowed from attendees using social media tools to share what was being discussed, their thoughts and their experiences. This information was amplified further by the information be re-shared (retweeted on Twitter) and by other opinions being expressed about all things SXSW. But how is it that you ensure you don't miss an important piece of information from within your social media connections or even outside of your normal social media circles? From an earlier post on Cadmus , an algorithmic Twitter feed service, you may be aware of the idea of curation - filtering content to ensure that you don't miss the most relevant information. But who performs this curation and what roles do technology have in the process?