Philly Code Camp - Gold Sponsor!

I'm happy to announce that not only will I be attending Philly Code Camp 2010.1, but my new employer, Apprenda, will be there as Gold Sponsor, specifically of the Architecture track.

We may or may not be doing a presentation on SaaSGrid. Unfortunately we got our ducks in a row at a bit of the last minute on this, though we are eagerly awaiting a last-minute presentation slot to open up, whether that be due to a presenter's sickness, travel difficulties or sudden enrichment of their bank account. *cough* ;) As it is we missed NYC Code Camp 4 and New England Code Camp 13 :( We are also looking for future Code Camp sponsorship and presentation opportunities!

I believe we are going down to Philly the evening of Friday the 9th, and possibly considering staying as long as overnight Saturday. I don't believe I've ever been to/near Philly before ... perhaps driven on a nearby bypass?

One more note, SaaSGrid may make an appearance at CloudCampNYC on April 20th as well. TBD.

Would like to share

Would like to share the StorageByMail website which we revamped over the past couple months, and relaunched on Rackspace Cloud servers for the client last weekend. StorageByMail is an NYC-based startup that enables customers to conveniently ship items into and out of storage.

The original site was in classic ASP, using all dynamic SQL. The new, more secure site is in ASP.NET with bound parameters, uses updated cryptography and the MembershipProvider and RoleProvider to replace a legacy homegrown user repository. Various new functionality has been added, as well as Telerik GUI controls for improved usability and user experience. AJAX abounds.

Dan @ SBM, we enjoyed working with you, and certainly hope to do so again.

Quick stop in: Tweet Cloud

What a crazy month!

Four projects going full-steam, and a trip to Charleston to visit Blackbaud the first half of last week. Surprisingly, pre-Thanksgiving travel wasn't the horror I expected.

Created a Tweet Cloud based on a year's worth of my tweets, pretty cool:

Very Interesting SaaS Consulting CTO work

For about a month or so now I've been serving as consulting CTO for a stealth mode NYC startup in the SaaS/SCM/BI space. We've been researching and vetting a suite of products for integration as a SaaS offering. Lots of vendor phone calls, trial installs, conversations with industry leaders who really know their stuff.

My client has now inked some licensing paperwork. With the clock ticking on some expensive software licenses, it's time to move on to the rapid prototyping stage. We're looking at utilizing VPS (virtual private server) images -- perhaps "in the cloud" on EC2, perhaps at a more conventional datacenter -- to allow quick and flexible server provisioning as we explore the caveats of integrating these disparate architectures in varying configurations.

This prototype will serve multiple purposes: as stated above, we need to get to know the gotchas of operating and offering these products as a suite, as well as gain domain- and product-specific knowledge. We need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of various arrangements of the products and the supporting/surrounding infrastructure. The CEO of course needs something to put in front of potential investors and early clients.

I am really looking forward to this -- it's going to be a lot of fun. And, as always, a great learning experience.

End of year Wrapup

2008 draws near a close. It has been a fantastic year, full of new friends, learning and fresh experiences. 2008 had its challenges of course, but I honestly couldn't ask for a better year.

Involved in a ton of projects right now. Still refining my SharePoint skills for the new day job; also getting familiar with Microsoft Dynamics/CRM. I'm getting a serious Hyper-V setup going on in the home office, for dev/test/play purposes.

We're working to rebuild the Change Round-Up website and webservice API from the ground up; I'm getting ready to deploy the first piece of the new framework to production sometime in January. Various Higher Efficiency projects include work on an IVR+.NET webservices project, PHP/MySQL work for a Moodle module, and a complete overhaul of the Higher Efficiency website to boot.

Together with Griff Townshend and TVUG, I'm working on Tech Valley Code Camp 2009.1 -- we've settled on a March date, though we haven't picked a weekend yet. Details to follow of course; website in the process of being put up again, the host paved it with a default Plesk install after TVCC 2008.

Personally, I'm getting up to speed on Azure and SDS, as well as continuing Python explorations with Google App Engine (GAE) and BigTable. Starting to do some work with Amazon Web Service's (AWS) SimpleDB as well -- I hope to be able to present a session comparing these horizontal data offerings sometime in the spring.

Hoping everyone has safe and happy holidays, and here's to an even more awesome 2009!

Making a career move

Monday (yesterday) morning I gave notice to my current employer, so I can officially announce: I've accepted a role as Senior Consultant with Infusion Development.

Infusion is a boutique Microsoft technologies consulting firm, with offices in Manhattan, Toronto, Boston, London, Dubai; I think there's an office in LA as well, and there's a virtual office here in Albany, NY. Infusion works pretty closely with Microsoft, doing a lot of Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) work. They also employ a surprising number of MVPs, given their relatively small size, and have some sort of VAR or OEM relationship with Microsoft and the Surface. Once upon a time they derived a lot of revenue from the financial services sector, but the past year or two have spent time refocusing business development efforts on the resort industry in Dubai. Yes, THAT Dubai. Hey, who knows, maybe someday ...

For the first six months, at least, I'll be doing some SharePoint work here in Albany for the NYS Department of Correctional Services. I first used SharePoint and VSTO back in 2006 at Xerox; newer versions are out, but frankly, not a lot seems to have changed, at least not drastically. I'm surprised there's still so much COM interop -- wasn't Office 2007 supposed to be purely .NET-driven? Then again, so was Vista ...

Hoping to achieve another Microsoft MVP nomination, and actually win MVP status, this time around. Not sure yet where to focus my efforts -- do they have MVPs for Azure yet? I'm sure the MVPs at Infusion can offer me some insight here.

Anyhoo, my last day with Davis Vision will be Friday, November 7th. I can't say enough good things about the people and the environment at Davis -- they're good people doing good work. They're open-minded toward Agile, but not fanatical. They've started using automated unit testing. They're trying to embrace TDD and CI. I would highly advise .NET developers in the Albany area to apply, they have growing teams supporting a fairly complex web app, or collection of web apps, and the SOA-ish middle tier and desktop GUI. If I weren't constantly driven so hard to create change, I could see myself happily continuing on at Davis for quite some time to come. Their technology roadmap just isn't quite aggressive enough to keep me interested over the long term however -- I was starting to feel as though I wasn't being technically challenged, didn't have a lot of room left to grow there.

My first day on the job with Infusion will be Monday, November 10th.

Tech trends to keep an eye on

I love how they all have overlap and integration points, and yet SOA/cloud stuff is really on the opposite end of the spectrum from a lot of concurrency technologies and practices:

Mobile devices
RIAs (Rich Internet Applications - Smart Clients)
Clouds/Grids
SOAs (Service-Oriented Architectures)
SOGs (Service-Oriented Grids)
Concurrency
Functional Programming

Mark my words, the next decade in the industry will be dominated be these concepts. They will certainly be playing a role in upcoming posts and presentations.

Back-and-forth: Microsoft's cloud data offering, SSDS

Quick, raise your hand if you're writing code using SQL Server Data Services right now.

How about, raise your hand if you've even heard of SSDS?

Microsoft's nearly-spanking-brand-new cloud data offering, SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) is a Google BigTable-like horizontally-structured data cloud, still in beta.

Horiztonally what? The basic data model is authorities, containers and entities. Using authorities, one is able to geographically distribute one's data -- not unlike Amazon's Availability Zones, and something Google App Engine and Google's BigTable betas don't yet offer.

Truly scalable web applications beg for this sort of backend. For a slight trade-off in latency, you have extremely affordable, dynamic, distributed capacity.

My friend Michael O'Neill over at crisatunity, one of those DBA guys, isn't a big fan of the data cloud model, at least not at the oustset of this conversation. We're going to have a blog back-and-forth on this topic over the next few weeks, as we both test out the beta, and I prepare for a couple of presentations for an upcoming Code Camp and local user group.

Not only do I come at this from a Developer (vs DBA) perspective, but this sort of service is the sort of thing that's helping drive down the cost of starting up a new business. As CTO of Change Round-Up, I believe cloud services offer us the ability to address a Top 50 retailer's peak transaction volumes, without having a lot of over-priced under-utilized in-house capacity.

I look forward to seeing where this conversation takes us, and if anyone's opinion on SSDS, or cloud services in general, is swayed.

Computer forensics & cloud computing

By now, if you're active enough of an online user to be reading this blog, you've surely heard of "cloud computing." You may even have heard of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud, more commonly referred to as EC2.

Cloud computing offers a lot of possibilities and potential. Let's not forget, it "levels the playing field," and all that other corporate jargon that hopefully translates into delivering Fortune 100 computing capabilities to those of us technical sorts who don't, or who no longer, work for the 800 pound gorillas of the industry.


Clouds also unfortunately seem to offer a lot of surface area for abuse and crime. Email spammers have been loving EC2 -- it didn't take long for most of AWS' IP range to get blacklisted by all the major spam watchlists.


What about something a little more sinister? What if an evil foreign spy or terrorist or hacker needs a place to host a bot command & control server, or a temporary shell account for accessing a more meaningful target, or needs a private place to host a "sensitive" IRC conversation or dead drop some blueprints?

When you shut down an AMI instance on EC2, that image resets to its stored state -- all session data is lost. All typical system & service logs, gone. Sure, I know you still have logging at the boundary of the cloud, but with the huge amount of potential data flowing in and out of a cloud, how do you identify individual users of individual services provided by a transient host image, particularly when they make expert efforts to cover their tracks? And what if the owner of the image decides to engage in malicious behavior, through the host server image, from a third IP address, and then claim someone must have stolen their password or keypair to the image?


Now I'm no security expert, perhaps this isn't as big a potential issue as I make it out to be. I'd love to be contradicted here!

Of course, none of that is as scary as the thought of this guy as our Commander in Chief.


Edit: It was noted on #freehackersunion that Tor, and for that matter other such services, offer you an ability to put an anonymous host on the Internet already. Sure, but Tor's bandwidth typically sucks, and the guy sitting on the exit owns you. EC2 basically commoditizes anonymous hosts, all you need is a stolen ID and credit card number.