Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction The Social Collective

bdg welcomes Michael Buckbee!

mike_buckbeeWe’re very pleased to announce that industry veteran, entrepreneur and Rails developer Michael Buckbee joined the bdg team today as CTO and Lead Developer on The Social Collective!

Mike’s career path is surprisingly similar to my own — in multiple ways. Fresh out of college, he joined a health industry startup called Aristar in 1999. They were acquired by SoftMed, which was then acquired by 3M HIS. (Recall that I worked at Plumtree, which was bought by BEA, which was bought by Oracle.) Unlike yours truly, who left Plumtree in 2002, Mike stayed on at 3M. As someone who just doesn’t know what it means to get bored, he also started several side projects. The most successful of these was Fabjectory, which could best be described as a 3D printshop that allows people to take their avatars (or other objects from the virtual world) offline and reincarnate them as real life figurines.

Again, our paths resemble one another, in an almost uncanny way. As I was toiling away on Feedhaus, Mike was building FeedMail, which essentially tried to allow people to read and respond to email from inside a feed reader. Like Feedhaus, the idea never really took off. However, some of Mike’s other projects — like Fabjectory — generated an amazing amount of buzz, including articles in the New York Times and WIRED. Prior to starting Fabjectory, Mike had yet another side project called Second411 which allowed people to search for virtual items both in-world and on the web. Second411 was purchased by ESC in October of 2006.

Never one to settle for just a few side-projects, Mike also worked on FoxyMelody, Watchlister, OneToFive, FeedSpeaker and an open source HTTP queue that runs on Google’s Application Engine. Here at bdg, we’ve long been in the business of throwing lots of spaghetti at the fridge and seeing what sticks, so obviously Mike will fit right in. Visit Mike’s blog and project page for more about his amazing career.

As Lead Developer on The Social Collective, Mike is already busy getting the site prepped for SXSW 2009, which will launch early in Q1.

Please join me and the rest of the bdg team in extending a warm welcome to Mike!

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Chris Bucchere’s Oracle Open World Schedule

oracle_open_world_unconferenceI’m headed to Oracle Open World on Saturday, 9/20. Here’s my proposed schedule. Like I said earlier, I’m probably going to spend most of my time in the unconference anyway, but here’s what looked interesting to me.

[Editor’s note: I’ve removed the gCal from here because it defaults to the current date, so it’s not really usable anymore, now that Oracle Open World 2008 is a thing of the past.]

If you’d prefer, you can also access this schedule in XML or ICAL format.

Categories
bdg The Social Collective

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

sxswithe_social_collectiveI am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Categories
bdg The Social Collective

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

sxswithe_social_collectiveI am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Categories
bdg The Social Collective

Conference Social Networking Made Simple

the_social_collective(2)Three and a half months have transpired since our stellar debut at BEA Participate. (In internet time, that’s a lifetime.) But better late than never, I’m very pleased to announce the launch of our marketing home on the web: www.thesocialcollective.com!

Please have a look and let us know what you think.

Categories
Personal

Friday Fun: Rails, Django and Caprese Salad

twitter(2)I had this Twitter argument today with former coworker, fellow web developer and friend Bryan Hughes:

bucchere: The Spring Framework is driving me crazy. If this were Rails, I’d be done already.

huuuze: @bucchere If it was Django, it’d be faster and ready to scale.

bucchere: @huuuze I’m not interested in a religious war right now. Please don’t provoke me. 😉

huuuze: @bucchere No war — even the Rails guys agree: http://is.gd/1ZZu

bucchere: @huuuze Apparently Gluon is even faster than Django. But is anyone using it? You have to consider factors other than performance.

huuuze: @bucchere Um, Django’s used by thousands. It’s not some fringe framework. Guaranteed anyone that’s used RoR and Django will prefer Django.

bucchere: @huuuze How could you make that “guarantee” when you’ve never used Rails? I said I didn’t want a religious war, you damn Python Nazi. 😉

huuuze: @bucchere I’ve built a couple sites using Rails. How many sites have you built using Django?

bucchere: @huuuze bdg’s svn server just crashed. I have more important things to do than continue this pointless argument.

huuuze: @bucchere Then quit wasting time on Twitter. I’m not trying to start anything with you. Just be aware that RoR isn’t the only game in town.

bucchere: @huuuze There are lots of religions too. And if I want to pick one and say the others are “wrong” then that’s my prerogative.

huuuze: @bucchere Whatever dude. Not sure why you’d say Django is “wrong.”

bucchere: @huuuze All I’m saying is that language/framework wars are like religious wars. I have mine, you have yours. Leave it at that.

bucchere: Enjoying a homemade caprese — my favorite salad. (Now watch while @huuuze tells me his favorite salad is better than mine.)

huuuze: @bucchere Having never tried caprese, I have no opinion on the matter.

bucchere: @huuuze LOL. I’m glad we can still be friends. 🙂

huuuze: @bucchere Get real. I’m only friends with Christians and Django users. 😉

* * *

So the time it took me to compile this discussion made me wonder why Twitter doesn’t have threaded discussions. Summize (now search.twitter.com) has “conversations” but, like Facebook’s wall-to-wall feature, just because the posts occur consecutively, it doesn’t mean that they’re actually “in” the same thread. If I were re-writing Twitter, adding threaded discussions — and with it, the ability to reply to a specific Tweet — would be near the top of my list.

Happy Friday everyone (and happy 3-day weekend for hard-working and hard-twittering Americans)!

Categories
bdg Software Development

Shameless Self-Promotion

panel_picker_voteAt last year’s SXSW I said to myself: “Self, you need to be speaking at this conference next year.”

Help me fulfill my self-fulfilling prophecy and please take a minute to vote for one (or both) of my proposed talks! Unlike the SXSWi Web Awards last year, you don’t have to vote every day — once is plenty.

The first is a solo presentation on the future of RSS.

The second is a panel discussion on whether it’s better to have one horizontal social network like Facebook or loads of smaller, niche social networks.

Thanks for your support.

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction The Social Collective

New Video: Demo of Conference Social Application

This is a 30-minute clip from the general session at BEA Participate from back in May. Jay Simons and I demo the social application that bdg built for the conference, known now as The Social Collective.

Categories
bdg

RubyNation Community Site Accepting Registrations!

bdg is very proud to be a RubyNation sponsor! The sold-out conference is just two weeks away. However, whether you’re registered or not, if you want to network with other DC-area Rubyists, please take a minute to sign up for the Ruby Nation community, which you can access at http://rubynation.org/community.

We built this site for RubyNation using our new white-label social networking product for conference attendees and other members of the local Ruby community. This application made its debut at the BEA Participate conference in early May. It attracted over 800 registrants and generated 75,000 page views during the week of the conference. And of course, it’s written entirely in Ruby on Rails.

If you’re coming to RubyNation, thinking about coming to RubyNation (or you’re a Rubyist who wishes he or she could make it to RubyNation), feel free to sign up for the site. Registration is easy and painless. Once you’re in, you can “pimp” your profile with an avatar or photo, links, RSS feeds and products that you know and love. You can view and participate in discussions about each session at RubyNation and you can create and join groups to interact with your peers about a variety of interesting topics about Ruby (or anything under the sun).

So, don’t waste any more time reading about this stuff — come on in and let’s get social at http://rubynation.org/community!

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction The Social Collective

The Social Collective Debuts at RubyNation

We’re very pleased to announce that, together with the organizers of RubyNation, we debuted our social application “The Social Collective” today as a means for RubyNation conference attendees and other Rubyists to meet and interact with their peers.

This is a very similar codebase to what we deployed at BEA Participate in May, but without ALI or ALBPM. These BEA (now Oracle) products provided a great, scalable and flexible architecture, but we didn’t feel it was a good use of our resources (i.e. $$$s) to continue to use these products and we didn’t want to pass this cost on to RubyNation, which, BTW, is only charging $175 for two jam-packed days of Ruby awesomeness.

So, for those of you who have been following all this social goodness coming from bdg, there are now two distinct versions of The Social Collective: one that uses BEA/Oracle products and one that does not. This affects pricing (obviously), so if you’re interested in either, please contact us to find out more.

And in the meantime, if you’re as gung ho about Ruby as we are, sign up for an account and help us grow the Ruby community here in DC and beyond!