When Mike IMed me a few months ago to ask if I would join him and Kunmi for StartupXLR8R, I resisted at first. I am already focusing so much time on STRUCTO, and already distracting myself with side projects like WhoMails.Me and ProudlyMadeinDC (the latter of which Mike is a co-founder), that another project would be too much to handle. But we approached it with a different spin. While we all had...
In February of this year I presented at the DCPHP meetup. Based on my experience deploying large client applications built in PHP using AWS and Rightscale, I gave a detailed walkthrough of how to set it up. Fuzzy video below:
As mentioned previously, I’m co-founder of ProudlyMadeinDC, a central site showcasing DC’s startups, showing to the world, and to ourselves, that DC is an up-and-coming startup hub. We started it as a small side project, but it’s grown to become real movement, helping to power the rise of DC startups. I presented at Ignite DC 6 (slides below, full video coming soon), so what I...
I’ve always loved DJing. I’m the kid who made mixtapes for his friends in high school. I got a small taste of it senior year, when I had my full setup in my basement, and hosted many sweaty fraternity parties (while destroying half a dozen speaker systems). But I never really understood what to do, and could never find a way of learning how (while most DJs I spoke to were self taught...
Thanks to Nick for catching me doing what I do best… checking e-mail. A big thanks to the organizers and other sponsors of BarcampDC3. It was a great experience for everyone, and it’s hard to believe that this is the the third one, organized by essentially the same group of people. Startup Metrics for Pirates – Jared dug in depth one of the most important concepts of the...
It’s hard to believe that a little over two years ago, the first Barcamp was held – being my first foray into the DC tech community. It was a life-changing experience, as it’s where I met all the people I work with on a daily basis, inspire me, and genuinely consider my friends. I’ll be speaking/organizing on two main topics: Freelancing After years of moonlighting before...
The DC 311 application I built and Zach designed received an Honorable Mention in the Apps for Democracy competition!
Read my full post at my other blog
Background: The DC government is exposing an API for their 311 call center, to allow application developers to build open source tools to make it easier for citizens to submit issues. As part of it, they and iStrategyLabs have launched a second Apps for Democracy contest. The creative juices are flowing, and I have a few ideas I plan on implementing. But first things first… in order to make...
Last weekend, a few dozen developers gathered together at Viget’s beautiful offices in Reston to… talk nerdy. Out of all the conferences I’ve been to, it was one of the best. It was directly honed on developers, and all talks were targeted as such. That meant no talks about marketing, gov 2.0, branding, public relations, blogging, twitter, or anything else social media/PR, etc...
Like last year, I woke up at 5 AM to work at a soup kitchen in DC. It’s always fun to drive around DC afterwards, as the streets are empty.