Category: CJUG

MongoDB Meetup

Tonight I went to the Chicago MongoDB Meetup group. I have used MongoDB, but not in production.

I met a few people who expressed interest in presenting at CJUG. Sometimes running a group feels like living paycheck to paycheck. It is rare that I have speakers lined up more that a month in advance.

Always be closing.

Anyway, I met a few more people who run small consulting firms here in Chicago. It seems like there is a startup scene developing in Chicago. On the other hand, maybe it’s been here for a while and I was not aware of it because I was at a huge corporation.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. It looks like the image has been changed on the Wikipedia page since 2011. I could not find this image on the Mongo DB site.

April 19th CJUG Meeting

The next Chicago Java Users Group Meeting is April 19th. Jeff Palmer of CGUG will talk about Groovy on Grails.

This talk will give a brief introduction to Grails. The goal of the talk is to help users get started and productive with Grails. The talk will demonstrate how to build a Grails app from start to finish. It will cover most of the core Grails components, including domain classes, controllers, scaffolding, GSP tags, GORM, services, Grails JavaScript and Ajax support, and URL mapping.

Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. Grails is a web application framework written in Groovy that uses “convention over configuration” to build web applications quickly.

Jeff Palmer is an application developer for Follett Higher Education Group. Jeff has a MS in Computer Science from DePaul University and is a Sun certified Java 5 programmer. For the last three years he has been actively focused on alternative JVM languages, such as Groovy and Ruby, along with their respective web frameworks, Grails and Rails. Jeff is a co-founder of the Chicago Groovy User Group.

Time: 6:00
Place: CME
20 South Wacker Drive
ULL-A Auditorium
Chicago IL, 60606
map

To RSVP, please go here.

CME Employees, please contact Joshua Bennett to RSVP.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Vatican Virgil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

 

CJUG Meeting 2011-03-15

I gave the presentation earlier tonight at the CJUG Meeting. We had nothing else lined up, so I did one on Android.

I was looking for a new place to live for the past few months, and that took up a lot of time. So I was not able to put as much time into my presentation as I was hoping. So the presentation was pretty short. I learned about Android doing it, and nobody threw anything at me or walked out.

CME provided space and food. You can find my contact on Twitter. I think next month we will have someone come in and talk about Groovy on Grails. I was contacted by someone who could talk about JMS. There might be a Mongo Java API one in the works. I would also like to do one on Akka. There is an Akka API for Java. I think the Actor model of concurrency will displace the threading model over time.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Vatican Virgil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

 

CJUG Meeting 2011-02-15

We have another CJUG Meeting on February 15, 2011. Ray Ploski of Red Hat will talk about Drools. You can find info on the CJUG site here. You can RSVP for it here.

The past few CJUG meetings have gone pretty well. We are now having them at CME. It has really helped our attendance. We used to be lucky to get a dozen people. Now we get about 30. The RSVP software we are using is called gathers.us. It was made by a few guys here in Chicago. It uses the “freemium” model, and free events are limited to 50 responses. A few times we hit that limit. If we keep hitting it consistently we might have to either find something else or convince the GathersUs developers to increase that limit. They have responded to some feedback from me and a few other people, so we will see what happens.

For future CJUG meetings, there are some plans in the works. I will probably give a presentation in March on Android. Jeff Palmer of the Chicago Groovy Users Group will give one in April about Grails. Someone from a local consulting firm might be able to give one about hooking mobile apps up to JEE servers.

I would also like to get some presentations about some trends in the software industry. I think that the current threading model of concurrency is being replaced by the Actor model. The Akka library in Scala can also be used in Java. I would like to have a presentation on that. Also, NoSQL is gaining some traction. I would like to have a presentation on MongoDB, showing how to use it and some examples with the Java API.

If anyone could do these (or point me to existing presentations that I could use), that would be great. Alternatively, I could collaborate on these with someone. We could set up a GitHub account and hash out a presentation deck and some code; I think using Maven would be the best bet. I do not have a Mac, so the deck would have to be in OpenOffice.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Vatican Virgil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil. Note: Some images may contain spoilers.

CJUG 2010-11-16: Intro To Hadoop

The next meeting of the Chicago Java Users Group will be on November 16th at CME.

Michael Segel will give an introductory talk on Hadoop.

Michael is an independent consultant who has been bouncing around Chicago for 20+ years. Michael has been working w Hadoop and HBase for the past year at Navteq and is the Founder of the Chicago area Hadoop User Group (CHUG).

Michael will be presenting a high level introduction of Hadoop covering what Hadoop is, and why companies are considering it.

It will take place at CME.

Where: CME
20 South Wacker Drive
ULL-A Auditorium
Chicago IL, 60606
map

RSVP link here

The post on the Chicago Java Users Group site is here.

2010-04-26 Update

We had a Chicago Java Users Group meeting on April 20th. Our speaker was Damodar Chetty, a consultant from Minneapolis. He talked about Tomcat configuration. There was a bit of a problem: We did not have a projector. Every room we have reserved at Loyola has had a projector, so I assumed we would have one this time. There was a very large projector screen, which was ironic. I put in a request for a projector, but it did not go through properly. Damodar did pretty well under the circumstances. If you need a speaker for your JUG, contact him at his site.

I posted to the JUG Leaders list for advice on how to handle this in the future. Someone said one thing to do is get the speaker’s notes ahead of time and be ready to print out copies or copy the file from a thumb drive. Another one of those brilliant and practical ideas that never occurs to you when you really need it.

I am still looking for a job. I talked with a recruiter a couple of weeks ago who gave me some good advice on my resume. I am reworking it, and I think it is a lot better. I am also getting more focused. I started learning Ruby, and I will continue with it, but I may pull back on that a bit. I will re-focus on Java and JVM languages and technologies: Java, Scala, and Android. There was an Android workshop put on by Chicago Android. I learned a lot, and I will get more into Android. Recently I got a free Droid phone. I will go to Verizon and see what it would cost to use a plan for Droid.

 Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Roman Vergil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

2010-03-17 Update

I presented last night at Chicago Java Users Group. I went to a big Oracle seminar and talked about the latest news about the Oracle/Sun merger. We also had a presentation by Bjorn Freeman-Benson of New Relic.

I have started learning some new technologies. I am still a Java guy, but I am looking into Ruby as well. A few people in the past month tell me that if I knew more Ruby they could hire me right now.

I am also learning Drupal. I am now running Drupal and WordPress on my VPS. It is dog slow. I think it might be because I am running Drupal on PostgreSQL. I am trying out PostgreSQL for the first time. Maybe I need to configure it better, or maybe running two databases on a VPS with 300 MB of memory is just not a good idea. I may try setting up Drupal with MySQL and see if it is any faster.

I am also working on a small web app to administer a James server. I am doing it in JSF with Hibernate. I mentioned it on the list, and there was not much interest in it. I will keep it up anyway since I am trying some new stuff.

 Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Roman Vergil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.

2010-02-16 CJUG Meeting

There will be another meeting of the Chicago Java Users Group on February 16, 2010. The speaker will be Yair Goldfinger, a founder of ICQ. He will cover two topics: Building an instant messaging service, and using DSLs in Java.

NOTE: The location will not be at Loyola University, but at the offices of Dotomi at 168 North Clinton. People will need to be buzzed in and escorted up to the second floor, but we will either have someone stationed in the lobby, or have someone come down every few minutes to see if there is anyone waiting.

 Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Roman Vergil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.