Mike Zornek

Conference Notes: CodeBEAM America (San Francisco) 2025

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:56:13 -0800

After a run of bad luck where I had to cancel Elixir-related conferences at the last minute (once because of the smoke storms that hit NY, and once because I got COVID before the conference), this week I enjoyed some time at CodeBEAM America 2025 in San Francisco.

I had a great time at the conference. The content was high quality and well presented. The in-person attendees totaled around 100 people, with another 150 online. I got some well-enjoyed real-world face time with a few old friends, online book club peeps, and maybe even some future clients.

Notable Talks

A few notable talks that landed for me:

Jenny Bramble and Adrian Dunston did an excellent talk, “Detective Hat: Investigating Production Issues,” reviewing how to approach production incidents, communicate with your peers, question assumptions, and ultimately learn from the experience. The pair was well prepared, and the content well delivered.
James Arthur code dropped Phoenix.Sync built on the back of ElectricSQL. I recently learned of Electric while catching up on the Local-first Conf videos just a few weeks ago. It was cool to learn that Electric is built using Elixir back then, but seeing some Phoenix-specific tooling drop was even more exciting. Kicking these tires will be high on my priority list.
Eric Saxby had a talk called “Acceptable Upgrades,” jam-packed with great code organization and testing strategies. I captured many handwritten notes, but the last one was to get the slides, as I could not capture them all.
Jason Axelson followed this up with another test-focused talk titled “Choosing an effective testing structure,” which had a bunch of great tips and library suggestions.
Digit did a talk titled “Nerves ❤️ Flutter” reviewing how the SmartRent Thermostat/Smart Home hub was built, and it was awe-inspiring. The nerves_flutter_support repo was made public as well to help people build on this.
Mitchell Hanberg gave us an update on the new Elixir Language Server, now named Expert. The now blessed official team has been hard at work building a new language server foundation built on the best of the previous three projects. A release still feels a few months away, but the update and teaser were much appreciated.
Kevin Barrett and Sloane Perrault did a talk, “CRDTs and the BEAM: Eventual Consistency Through Acronyms.” Having CRDT in the title, this was a session I’ve had circled on my calendar for months. The talk was an excellent review of how they are utilizing CRDTs to power the delivery of screen.garden, which allows real-time collaboration of standard Obsidian Markdown.

Conference Format

The talks were a mix of 40-minute and 25-minute sessions with ample time for hallway track discussions. A great balance.
There was a great 40-minute block each day for “Birds of a Feather” sessions. Early in the day, people voted on topics, and then the round tables where we ate lunch were signed for spontaneous discussions. I attended a table on WebAssembly, learning about wasmx on the first day, and then a table talking about Ash Framework and Igniter on the second day.

Vibes

While the majority of attendees seemed work-aligned with Elixir, there was also a healthy mix of Nerves, Gleam, and Erlang folks.
Everyone was very friendly and welcoming. There were people who had history and clumped together, but at the same time, I observed many people making space for new people to enter the circle and join in.
Presenting in pairs was popular and more so impressively executed. Everyone seemed well in sync with their presenting partner.
The chaos of the real world was not front and center in most talks (which is fine with me as I enjoy the escape), but it did leak through at times. I recall a specific moment when Ingela Anderton Andin was doing an OTP update. She was remote, presenting from her home in Sweden over video. There was some chatter at the end about how the conference would love to see her return in person in the United States in the upcoming year. There was an uneasiness in her reaction. Acknowledging without fully verbalizing the state of international relations. Seeing the forthcoming calendar of BEAM-related events, many happening in Europe, I had a similar response. I don’t know if United States citizens will be welcome there in 6 months.

Followup Learning Projects

Related to some discussion and possible project work, I bought the Ash book and started reading it on the plane ride home. I’ve worked with Ash before, but using the book to refresh my memory. I may even consider porting some of the Flick domain to Ash as a space to play around.
People were hyped about Cursor well over GitHub Copilot for AI codegen things. I need to experiment more with it.
Need to tinker with Phoenix.Sync.
I totally forgot about burrito. It was mentioned during Digit’s talk, and I should totally check it out in relation to building local-first software.

Burrito is our answer to the problem of distributing Elixir CLI applications across varied environments, where we cannot guarantee that the Erlang runtime is installed, and where we lack the permissions to install it ourselves. In particular, we have CLI tooling that must be deployed on-premise by consultants into customer environments that may be running MacOS, Linux, or Windows.

While I disliked the travel, and boy was I grumpy after the travel day on Wednesday, the conference was a tremendous success. This was my first time at a CodeBEAM event, and I highly recommend it.

ElixirConf Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 13:25:37 -0400

This past week I attended ElixirConf in Colorado. It was my first time out at an in-person conference since COVID lockdowns. As much as I hated the travel, it was great to see everyone.

I got a lot of face time with a handful of people I had worked with over the last two years and a bunch of others whose company I have enjoyed via online meetups, book clubs, and Twitter. Even a tiny in-person conversation adds an extra level to those ongoing “online peer relationships,” and I’m happy to have made many new connections.

* Yes, it would seem many Elixir companies are still hiring; though I’d say only half the talks mentioned that when historically, maybe 75% of the talks would so 🤷‍♂️ maybe there is a slight dip.

For more photos, check out this album started by Todd Resudek.

The conference content was fantastic, almost overwhelming.. I’ll note a few big takeaways below, but a complete review would be quite extensive and is out of scope for this post.

LiveView Native – Brian Cardarella of DockYard shared a new project that aims to provide a way to build mobile applications that can act as a LiveView client. Using this, you can connect a mobile application to a LiveView process on the server and then render native views based on heex templates, intermixing LiveView Native view renders with “normal” platform views (such as SwiftUI used in the demo). More info can be found on the LiveView Native marketing site, GitHub project, and related Hacker News thread. It is still pretty early tech but has a lot of people buzzing. I’ll share more thoughts after I get a chance to kick the tires.

Elixir 1.14 is out! It includes Kernel.dbg/2, a new macro for debugging, PartitionSupervisor for handling some bottleneck scenarios, improved errors on binaries and evaluation, slicing with steps, expression-based inspection and more.
Phoenix 1.7 is immanent. It will include verified routes and component properties. It also has Tailwind built-in as the default. Chris also shared a roadmap for future work which included plans to integrate some aspects of the phx_live_storybook project as well as a rethink of LiveView/Component messaging (which was a point of issue Miki Rezentes brought up in her talk and I’m in total agreement with – right now it’s a bit clunky).
I had an excellent time in my telemetry class on Tuesday. Still have to finish my last lesson, but I had some beneficial experiences adding custom events and attaching common library events through a informative collection of sample projects.
I sat in on many sessions showcasing the continued evolution of Livebook. Nice to see this tool continue to mature and empower education and knowledge sharing.
Mark Ericksen did a presentation walking through some tools that can help make normal Ecto usage apply to a globally distributed database environment, as one would see on fly.io. I have not done a fly deployment (yet), but this is something I should check out.
juvet is a cool little in-dev framework for making Slack bots.
Kip Cole’s talk on Time Algebra and a new library called Tempo was an unexpected and impressive talk.
David Bernheisel is preparing a paid-for extension to his Ecto in Production resource. I can’t wait to support it.
Owen Bickford talked about his new WebAuthn LiveView component, which simplifies integrations that want to lean on this new auth tech. Looks extremely useful, and as iOS starts to promote PassKeys, I think many will seek this out.
And a lot more which I don’t have time to document.

Conferencing during COVID is stressful. I masked up aggressively during the plane trip to and from the show. I did not mask while attending. Most people did not mask. I’d guess maybe 5% did mask.

The big value of the show for me was socializing with people, from hallway chats to lunches and even some code pairing. Masking during these interactions would have been a notable hindrance. I have a hard enough time hearing people with my bad ear in these rooms, let alone adding a mask to my own voice (or theirs). If the conference required masking or if I observed a community norm, I was prepared to do so, but in the end, I did not. I’ll live with that outcome, keep an eye out for symptoms, and take an at-home test over the next few days. Bummed this stress point is even here, but those are the cards we are dealt.

The last takeaway I’ll note is a personal observation I need to return to sharing. As an iOS developer, I did many presentations and conference talks but have not mirrored this behavior with my presence in the Elixir ecosystem. In part, during the early years, it was mostly imposter syndrome – as an Elixir newbie, who am I to tell these people anything – but those days are past, and I really need to start giving back some.

I expect the ElixirConf videos to be shared publicly on YouTube in the next few months. Keep an eye out for more info on their channel.

ElixirConf Talks of Interest

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 16:38:56 -0400

I’m attending ElixirConf this week, and in preparation, I looked over the session schedule to see what talks are of interest to me. I figured I’d share my notes in case anyone is curious about what’s on my mind. If you are also in attendance, please say hi.

https://2022.elixirconf.com/schedule

Tuesday

Tuesday is the training day. I picked Instrumenting Elixir Applications.

I’ve been on projects using observation tools like open telemetry and DataDog but have never been personally responsible for setting it up, so I have a lot to learn.

Wednesday

Wednesday starts with a curious “virtual-only” morning session list. I think this was done to allow the sister NervesConf “sub-conference” to do its thing in the meeting spaces. I am not attending, so will most likely look to watch some virtual sessions in the hotel lobby and make friends with other stragglers.

After José Valim keynote, we have tracks of three topics:

Robust, Distributed, and Parallel Processing for Enormous Images Using SuperVisor, Node, Flow, Nx, and evision.
Porting Legacy Backend Services into Elixir, Seamlessly
Building a HEEX component library

I’ll be attending the HEEX component library talk. Improving my skill set at building components is high on my interest list right now, and I’m curious to see what Matthew has to share.

I’m likely to watch the recording of the Porting Legacy Backend Services later as that is also something of interest to me. So often, I try to encourage people to avoid the big rewrite, and this sounds like a good match for that since the summary includes “while keeping the user experience the same during the whole migration process.” 👍

I don’t have a current need for scalable image processing but will keep the talk recording in mind in the future.

Next up:

Livebook smart cells are amazing
Classifying Bot IP Addresses in Phoenix
The Elixir Of Web Scraping

I think I’ll be going to the Livebook talk. I’ve only done some basic Livebook writing in the past, but I have some ideas about building LiveView/collaborative UX demo tools and it would be helpful to see what’s new.

The other talks sound useful but are not active topics for me right now.

For the final Wednesday morning choices, we have:

Make a Soundcloud like app in a week and make it fit in a seven dollar box
Dx - a pragmatic inference system based on your Ecto schema
Cryptography and Elixir

I’ll be attending the Soundcloud app talk. Curious to hear how that project has progressed and very interested in the topics around file uploading.

After lunch, we have two choices:

Ecto in Production - Migration Edition
Let’s talk to Industrial devices with Elixir & Nerves

I’m not doing an IoT or Nerves stuff, so this is an easy call for me. Improving large-impact Ecto migrations is a welcome focus, particularly given my client’s data sizes.

Next up:

Delightful Multiplayer Editing with Phoenix
Workflows and use cases for Elixir Nerves

Anxious to see how the Felt team is doing UI collaboration. This is one of the big reasons a project should choose Phoenix LiveView. It’s a great fit.

Next up:

Going Global with a Normal Phoenix App
Keeping your IoT fleet afloat with Sink

I’m curious to hear how Fly.io deployments are working out and will surely appreciate people sharing their edge cases and other considerations.

Next up:

Match Specs: Fast Functional Filtering with Matcha
Introducing Juvet: Building Bots in Elixir

That Match Specs talk seems too deep so for me. The Juvet one sounds interesting. Some of my product ideas are tools to make Slack more reasonable, so bot programming seems like a topic I would enjoy.

Wednesday’s final sessions:

Time algebra - a new way to think about and work with time
Making Elixir Honk: Implementing An Elixir Audio Library In Zig

I’m interested in both of these talks, though I’ll probably give the audio talk my attention. I’ve worked alongside Chris and am curious about what he has come up with. Also, have a passive interest in continued interest in Zig and what people are up to.

Thursday

Thursday starts with a morning keynote from Brian Cardarella.

Afterward, session tracks start with:

Onboarding New Elixir Members
In Production with Elixir, Rust, and WebAssembly
Caching with the Postgres WAL

I’ll probably watch the recording of the WebAssembly talk and attend the onboarding talk. I’m less confident I’ll be doing education as a business moving forward, but I’m still big on mentoring and curious about what this talk has to share.

In-between sessions, Test Double is offering a “Double Up with Test Double” session, and I might stop by to say hi and get some advice on my CQRS project.

Next track choices include:

“How to Grow your own Juniors”: A guide to mentoring in an Elixir Environment
Quick Iteration in Elixir - Tips from 6 Years of Professional & Hobby Elixir Development
WebAuthn + LiveView

I’m interested in all of these talks, but WebAuthn is high on my interest level. I’ll be there.

Next up:

Selling Elixir
Seems Good Enough to Me: Working with Testers to Derisk Elixir Upgrades
Wordle: Elixir Flavour

I’m curious about these talks, but none are on fire for me. I might take this slot as an opportunity to mingle a bit. We’ll see.

Next up:

Roll Cages, Pit Stops, and Victory Laps: The Launch of Elixir and LiveView at Scale on the New Cars.com
Self Taught to First Job!
E2E Reactivity - using Svelte with Phoenix LiveView

As a contributor to the cars.com project, I’m anxious to see Zack’s retrospective.

Next up:

Axon: Functional Programming for Deep Learning
Serverless to Serving Elixir: Migrating Serverless app to run on Phoenix
Have you got the ExFactor? Writing a refactor helper

I’ll probably go to the refactor talk. Kind of curious how that project works, though again, I might use this time for mingling.

Next up:

SOLID code isn’t flexible
Using Livebook to Teach Elixir
Review of using Elixir for 4 years in production

Very anxious to see Brooklin Myers’s Livebook talk. I hear he is using it a ton in the upcoming DockYard class. The other talks look cool too but I will have to wait till the recordings.

Final tracks for Thursday:

Learn you some pattern matching for great good!
Connect the Docs
Shifting Left: Secure Coding in Elixir Livebooks

I’m interested in all of these talks, but the one on documentation is close to my heart, and I will attend.

Friday

Morning track choices start with:

To MVP and beyond, a year in LiveView
A Javascripter’s trip to Phoenix and LiveView
Exploring Elixir Codebases with Archeometer

Probably going to stop by the Archeometer talk. Curious to see what that project is all about.

Next up:

Flame On: Profiling Elixir and Phoenix apps with Flame Graphs in Live Dashboard
Designing Data Intensive Applications in Elixir with Flow
Understanding common network protocols with Elixir

I would like to try out that flame graph tool but will probably attend the Flow talk since it aligns with my event-sourcing interests.

Next up:

I was wrong about LiveView
Searching Your Elixir Code
Embedded Web Apps in Elixir with LiveState

I’ll probably sit in on Jason’s talk. While I like LiveView and think it’s an excellent choice for many projects, I’m not sure I’m as all in (as it sounds like he is). I still feel like if the app lends itself to request-response it can be better to embrace that simplicity, particularly for user-facing pages that are often presented on mobile phones.

The day closes with closing keynotes from Chris Grainger and then Chris McCord.

It feels like this is going to be a packed conference. While I’ve outlined talks that interest me, I need to remember that the value of going in person is seeing others, so if I have to skip out on some of these and catch the recordings, I think that is fine too. I suspect the recordings will have a quick turnaround since they are already doing the virtual component, but we’ll see.

Philly ETE Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 07 May 2021 09:33:26 -0400

This week I attended the Emerging Technologies For The Enterprise 2021 conference online. Normally hosted in Old City Philadelphia, I’ve been a long time attendee of the show.

I find ETE to be a great place to hear about fresh tech things outside the echo chamber of my day to day work. This year’s event was no exception. One talk I really enjoyed was from Simon Wardley, “Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones: Sensing A Business Environment Before Taking Action”.

During this talk we will examine the level of situational awareness within business, why it matters and whether we can anticipate and exploit change before it hits us.

Simon reviewed his Wardley Mapping technique and I was impressed with the way this visualization can give you a fresh perspective about your company and its work. I’ve bookmarked this link index to learn more over the next few months.

I also enjoyed “The Edges of Cutting-Edge Languages: Where does the language end and ‘user space’ begin?” by Richard Feldman. Richard is a great presenter and teacher. I’ve seen him teach Elm locally via some Philly meetups and have previous enjoyed his other conference talks, like: Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm?. I was pretty confident I’d enjoy whatever he was showing. His talk summery:

For decades, mainstream programming languages have drawn similar boundaries around what’s a first-class part of the language and what’s a third-party addition outside the scope of the language.

For example, the language ships with a compiler that reads text files and compiles programs. The package and editor plugin ecosystems are completely separate. Compiled programs have unrestricted access to operating system primitives, unless they’re running in a browser. The list goes on!

A number of modern languages are drawing these boundaries in different places than where they’ve been drawn historically. This talk compares some of these languages and their boundaries, and introduces a new programming language that’s being developed to draw these boundaries in different places from others have before.

Come see what programming can be like when we redraw the foundational boundaries of our languages!

It was a really cool talk and I was able to hear about a bunch of languages that were new to me, including one Richard is working on called Roc. Roc is still super early but that page does link to a few video demos of what is being worked on and the ideas behind it all.

Other big themes of the conference:

The continued escalation and evolution of DevOps, infrastructure as code, automated deployments, etc. I dipped my toe into these technologies last year. I’m not sure they are what I want to be doing day to day but having knowledge and appreciation for them is likely to be important.
Observability is another big topic. Feel like we continue to see new opportunities here to improve stability of systems. Elixir itself has gain a lot of tooling for this recently and it feels like I should spend some time digging in.
Never ending language evolution.

For myself, I hope all these patterns and tools help small teams do more while keeping the team small – BUT I do worry how it is hard to ask any one person to have experience in all these areas of study.

The conference sadly did not really experiment with much online socializing. We had an event-specific Slack but no real organization around getting people to mingle. I’ve seem this be hit or miss at other online conferences but one of the things I do miss from the in-person ETE is seeing many locally Philly tech friends in the hallways. Hopefully we can return to in-person next year.

I’m told conference goers will have exclusive access to the talk videos through July so I would keep my eye on the Chariot Solutions YouTube channel if you want to check these out in the future for free later.

First ElixirConf, and Then Azeroth

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 15:20:41 -0400

Happy Friday everyone. Hope you all had a good and productive week. I myself am feeling pretty good.

Went heads down this week and made some project progress for both clients and personal endeavors. Today, Friday, I’m working from home. First cleaning up a bit and then probably some more client work. Would like to close a few threads before attending ElixirConf next week.

I’m going for four days. First two days are workshops and then two days of conference talks. My workshops will be:

Build Performant, Real-Time UIs with Phoenix LiveView - LiveView is something I have experimented with but have yet to get going in my projects. I am excited to get past the simple demos into more complex use cases.
Build a Smart Camera with Nerves, Phoenix, and Absinthe - I have almost no hardware experience and this is more of an experimental thing for me. Lots to learn!

It’s going to be a fun week. Over the last year I’ve really started to get over the beginner hump of Elixir and am ready to sink my teeth into some of the deeper aspects (or aspects like Nerves and embedded software I’ve never touched).

Sadly while I’m away at ElixirConf I’m also going to miss the opening of WoW Classic. I’m really excited to see how Classic works out as I’m not a fan of current retail WoW but still enjoy the lore and atmosphere of Azeroth. It sounds like the early days are going to result in a fair amount of login queues so maybe my Elixir distractions will be for the best.

Pretty sure I’m going to level a Gnome Mage as my main. Server is Herod (PvP).

Regardless to all this, I am also looking forward to September and a no more trips for a little while. As much as I like to get out I also love being home and enjoying my routines. I also need to start getting more time into my side project and start it’s marketing / validation path to see if it’s a real product or not. More to come on that.

Enjoy the weekend and have some fun.

On Conferences

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:23:59 -0400

I wish I had time to help run a conference (again). I have a lot of opinions.

I’d love to run a small conference where the rule was, everyone had to present in some form (30m presentations or shorter show and tell style talks). This would obviously cap the event at a small number of attendees but I think it would level the field in an interesting way.

For a slightly larger conference, I’d institute a no laptops / no phones policy in the conference hall. If you want to go back to your hotel room and take a call that’s fine, just don’t bring it to the hall. The hall is for socializing with the other speakers and guests. I know this might annoy people who like to take notes on a laptop/iPad but pencil and paper should suffice this time.

It’s summer conference season and I’m getting a little burnt out of the standard full time STAGE –> AUDIENCE format. We are in an age of YouTube, blogs, Twitter, newsletters, FaceTime, iMessage – and we don’t need to wait for the yearly conference to express our fresh ideas, we are doing it all the time.

In my opinion, a conference’s main goal is about using presentations to spark the fire of discussion amongst the attendees. Sadly many of the conferences I find myself at don’t do this and instead the attendees spend 90% of there time sitting silently in a dark room, everyone looking forward, no communication, no talking.

Some basic tips for conference organizers:

Make sure to plan lots of socializing time in-between talks, like for every 1 hour of talks and then there should be 1 hour of socializing.
Consider limiting individual talks to 30 minutes and have a section for shorter lightning talks. The goal is to get as many ideas out there as possible. Different ideas will stick with different people. The more the better.
Use circular tables. Yes this requires more floor space but it keeps people facing each other during breaks and naturally let’s other people break in to a conversation.
Make people change their seat every so often. A forced lottery seems harsh but you could also use topical tables, like one table is a “spaces” table and another is a “tabs”.

Notable conference behaviors I’ve seen and enjoyed.

Release Notes Conference breaks people into teams for dinners around town at different style restaurants.
CocoaLove conference embraced its hosting city with morning walking tours and site seeing.
I like the concept of pre-conference workshops. I think it allows those who are new to a platform to get a lot of hands on time before experiencing talks that usually don’t cater to them.
I loved the feel of old school MacHack. It was a 24-hour, 3-day conference where the opening keynote was at midnight. We took over the hotel lobby and worked on our hacks for the contest / presentation at the end. In between coding, in side rooms, people gave talks of all shapes and sizes. There was a movie night where we bought out a full theater and watched as a group. It was a real community building event.

I’d love to hear others stories/thoughts. Email me: mike@mikezornek.com or post a blog post on your own site.

Registered for Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2019

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 12:35:09 -0500

Just took advantage of the early bird pricing for Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2019 and got registered.

Entering its 12th year, the Emerging Technologies Conference has brought the leaders of the open source community to Philadelphia to teach about their projects, their work and how these technologies are changing software development. During this time, ETE has become one of the largest gatherings of developers in the mid-Atlantic.

I’ve been to ETE in the past and particularly like how it lets me sample lots of topics I don’t see in my traditional iOS circles. Lots of local tech friends usually show up so it’s a great way to say hi and meet people too.

Events page updated.

ElixirConf 2018 Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 19:54:59 +0000

After attending ElixirConf I am as confident as ever that Elixir is a language, community and ecosystem I want to continue to personally invest and participate in.

About two years ago I made the decision that I needed to diversify my technical skills outside the Apple ecosystem. I then went on to experiment and research lots of different languages and frameworks, including EmberJS, Go, Rust, Elm, HTML5 updates, React and Elixir.

The Elixir interest started from a broad recommendation from Dave Thomas who I had years before followed heavily while doing Ruby on Rails development. Elixir also had gotten momentum from my interests in Functional Programming and looking to solve problems outside of traditional Object Oriented Programming design patterns. Over the last few months I’ve gotten deeper into Elixir and I really like what I’ve found.

I’ll do a post in the future about why I’m liking Elixir so much. It’s a potentially large topic and I want to give it the space it deservers.

ElixirConf was a great event. Two days of training and two days of conference sessions; I took it all in. My personal estimate would put the training day attendance at around 150 and the full conference at around 500.

While educational, I found the class pacing to be mixed. I felt one went a little too slow and the other a little too fast. There was a wide gamut of Elixir experience in the audience so I think it’s challenging for the instructors to find a pace everyone can agree with. That said, I learned a ton in each of the two more introduction-based classes I attended. I was envious of the more advanced classes that were covering GraphQL and hardware development using Nerves — I heard people were very impressed with them. Maybe next year.

For the conference days we had some great keynotes and session. I loved hearing José Valim (creator of Elixir) talk about the future of the language including the core teams failed experiments with adding a type system and why it’s not on the horizon. Chris McCord (creator of Phoenix) did a closing keynote, reviewing progress with the framework including a preview of Phoenix LiveView which was very impressive and has an opportunity to shake things up in the single-page app space. Aaron Renner had a great talk on taming complexity which mirrored some of my previous iOS code patters with way better naming. Aaron Votre’s excitement about GraphQL is contagious and I’m anxious to get my hands dirty. Andrew Bennett has some great tips in his Sustainable Testing talk. Daniel Azuma did a great job showing how we can mix and match Docker with traditional OTP deployments for unique benefits. Some time slots were competitive for my attention. I sadly missed Boyd Multerer’s Introduction of Scenic and Eric Oestrich’s Going Multi-Node session which both were well received from chat in the hallways. I’ll be sure to watch them on YouTube in the week ahead. In fact the majority of the conference keynotes and sessions are already posted on YouTube if you want to take a look.

Despite my general shyness, the community was very welcoming and friendly when I put myself out there. I had some great conversations during breaks and lunch. Hopefully these will continue on the community Slack and forums — I need to spend some more time with those.

Finally, everyone is hiring. Almost every speaker who represented a company said they were hiring. While I’m not looking for full time employment its relieving to see such hiring interest in a more niche language than say my current source of income, iOS.

Next year ElixirConf will be in Denver and assuming I find a way to keep Elixir active in my development schedule (I have a potential Elixir subcontract in the fall as well as some personal projects) I plan to be there.

For more on Elixir check out its homepage.

Photos

WWDC 2018 Social Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 02:49:05 +0000

I just got back from my WWDC 2018 Social trip and it was a lot of fun. I figured I’d do a quick recap of the social side and leave room to talk about the tech stuff as I get deeper into the session videos in the weeks to come.

Costs

With a nod to Manton’s lead I thought I too would share my costs in order to help others understand what is possible despite WWDC generally being a large cost these days.

Plane fare (Southwest, Philadelphia to San Jose Roundtrip taking the early and late times to save a little bit extra): $564.00
Hotel: ($125/night, 4 nights + taxes & early checkin fee). Booked early on event date assumptions, was cancelable.: $642.00
Airport cab fair: $25 each way.
WWDC conference ticket: $0 (Big savings here obviously. If you can get value from the labs, the $1700 ticket cost can pay for itself but if you just want to watch the sessions, enjoy the free video streams on delay).
AltConf conference ticket: $0 (I’ve bought the $300 Hero ticket in the past but held back this year since I’m on my own again and trying to keep costs down. Kind of feel bad considering how well I enjoyed the talks there this year.)
Food and drinks: ~$300 Made a point to get some supplies at a grocery store early in the week so I could supplement eating out with some in-room breakfast mornings and snacks.
Podcast and other event tickets: ~$50

Total: ~$1600

TL;DR: Make your decision about WWDC early and keep an eye on the rumored dates. Book early with hotels that are cancelable. If you need some more help, find a roommate to split hotel/cab costs with.

Events

On Sunday night I attended the sjMacIndie party and saw a lot of conference friends. Venue was a little on the warm side but plenty of space so it didn’t get too stuffy. I did not recognize much of San Jose from my earlier WWDC trips (2002-2004) but I did recognize this venue as the previous pool hall where the student scholarship winners once had a party. In fact it was at said party where I won an iPod which I later sold to help cover my plane fare back in the day.

You can check out some of the old WWDC 2002 Student coverage we did via Wayback Machine and this video, with footage from the pool hall, I was able to find and re-upload.

On Monday I watched the Keynote and State of the Union with friends at the hotel. We had to jump wifi networks a few times but overall was very successful. Afterwords I headed to the live recording of ATP podcast which was a lot of fun.

On Tuesday I took in a few AltConf talks and also attended the Micro.Blog meetup. Really enjoyed the Setapp talk about their growth/recommendations and the detailed talk on improving app startup times. I also took some time on Tuesday to work on my own project, finally breaking down a long list of tasks into a new Pivotal Tracker project so I can start to track things better.

On Wednesday did more AltConf stuff. Really enjoyed Paul Hudson’s review of new iOS 12 additions. Also had a good time in the Finding Product Fit lab. At night I attended the Relay FM podcast recording which went great. Afterwords I went to the Breakpoint / AppCampForGirls event. I didn’t stay too long though, place was really dark and loud. Also kind of irked me that there was a separate VIP section. I really dislike the social cliques that pop up at industry conferences and seeing the VIP thing put a bad taste in my mouth.

Aside: I’d love to see some options for non-bar night events at conferences. A 24 hour hacking lab with whiteboard grouping around ideas; maybe with room corners for Mario Karting or boardgames/poker. I like hanging out but I don’t like drinking too much and I can’t hear people over the crowds. I miss MacHack in many ways. Maybe I’ll lead by example some day should I ever dawn my event organizer hat again.

On Thursday I got to attend a few morning talks at AltConf before heading home. Of them I really enjoyed the review of what Firebase is offering these days. I’ve been watching them since before they were bought by Google. Like any third-party component you have to accept some risk but I welcome the opportunity to use them to bootstrap a new idea some time in the future.

The journey home took a long while. I didn’t sleep much but did enjoy a bunch of podcasts.

Overall WWDC 2018 Social was a great success. It was awesome to say hi to some internet/conference friends and hear how everyone is doing. Now that I’m home it’s time to jump into the technical content and see what the WWDC sessions have to share. I’ll post more on that as I experiment.

Say Hello at WWDC!

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 01:49:44 +0000

A short message to say, yes I will be in San Jose for WWDC next week. No, I will not be in the conference itself but I will be hanging around AltConf and other events. If you see me, please say hi.

WWDC 2018 Social, Booked

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 19:39:04 +0000

I’m fully booked for WWDC week (Sunday, June 3rd – Thursday, June 7th) out in San Jose. No plans to attend the conference proper but looking forward to saying hi to friends and meeting some new ones at the alternative events.

If you end up going, please find me and say hi!

360iDev 2017 Takeaways

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 01:48:40 +0000

360iDev is a long standing iOS developer conference held out in Denver, Colorado. This was my first year attending after hearing many good things from friends. Some quick notes:

Sunday, was a pre-conference education day. It had a mix of full day and half day workshops. I think there was some good content to be had, but I don’t think the majority of the workshops were scheduled and paced right. Some felt like runaway session presentations, more than training. I will admit though I am very biased in what I like to see in my workshops / bootcamp environments being a teacher myself.
Monday saw the official kickoff of the conference. The opening keynote from Soroush Khanlou reviewed how his own blog had influenced his career and encouraged us all to share more, which I think is great.
The closing keynote on Monday came from Mike Lee and he tore apart the tech industry’s obsession with growth and how it has negatively impacted us all. He wasn’t afraid to point out how we enable it and I will say, while Mike’s loud presence can sometimes put me off, he does get me thinking.
Tuesday opened with a second blast of harsh reality with Jay Freeman’s, “That’s How You Get a Dystopia”. In this talk Jay pointed out how we are enabling some pretty scary scenarios, from the fragility of the Tor network, to Apple pulling VPNs from China. For more personal actionable ideas, Jay pointed out how we could augment our own data capturing methods to make sure if the data is ever breached its value could be lessened, eg: no need to capture the identifiable IP addresses of people when zip codes will do and are not 1:1 trackable).
Tuesday closed with a Stump the Experts panel and funny enough I ended up on the panel. (Must be my gray hair.) I was very happy to get an Apple IIc piracy/drm question right. Was also happy to hear Conrad’s Philly CocoaHead talk get quoted as a source to help the panel get 10 points for some other question.
On Wednesday, John (conference organizer) opened with a very transparent take on how this year conference went and it’s trajectory. While there are many positives experiences it was sad to hear the conference ended up running as a ~$10,000 loss this year. This is obviously a labor of love for John and his crew and to have a negative cash flow on top of all the volunteering is disappointing. They have started up a new Patreon to try help balance the loss. I’m signed up for a $10 monthly donation and if you want to support one of the longest running iOS conferences I’d love to see you join too.
Lunches came in the form of vouchers to visit the local eateries in favor of drab hotel catering which I think worked out great. Getting out of the hotel for some sun is a nice break too. My only real feedback here, would be to extend the lunch break a bit more, since I got the feeling more than a handful were late when returning and it’s not fair for the people doing presentations after lunch break.
The sessions themselves broke down into a mix of technical and social/skill topics and there were usually a choice of 3 or 4 per time slot. The fact that there were many hard choices is a good sign for the content’s quality.
I did two talks. One was on Running a Meetup and the other on Code Review. The Meetup talk had light attendance, which I kind of expected going in — it’s a niche topic. But, for the people who did come, they seemed to enjoy and I’m looking forward to seeing it hosted online for others. The Code Review talk saw a good crowd and many even stayed well after for discussion in favor of running out to lunch which I took as a good sign.
Walking away from the conference I’m very excited to get back to work and try some of these things out (both on current projects and new ideas). I also have a strong feeling to get more into open sourcing my code and in general sharing my work.

My thanks to John and all of the rest of the staff.

Speaking at 360iDev, Come Join Us.

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 May 2017 16:17:25 +0000

I’m happy to report some recent talk proposals were accepted and I’ll be speaking at 360iDev this August in Denver. I was already going to go to 360iDev regardless of the talks, I’ve heard great things from recent years, so this just makes the week that much more exciting.

My Talks:

Overcoming the Stress Surrounding Code Review, for the Betterment of Your Project and Career

Code Review is a practice where before a change is made to a code base, the code is first posted somewhere for peer review and critique. Code Review is an extremely productive way to catch problems before they are delivered to users as well as help individuals mature as programmers. In this talk we’ll explore Code Review by documenting the responsibilities of those involved, the person posting the code, the person (or people) reviewing the code, and then again back to the poster, as they react to the feedback given. In addition to the raw process of these stages we’ll also review the very human side of Code Review using real world stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. We’ll close with more general tips and tools that can help, as well as cover some of the how and why you might want to utilize these practices even in your own solo work. The best audience for this talk are people who are looking to improve their personal or team code processes. Those who attend will leave with very actionable strategies to execute productive code review on their own projects.

Starting, Growing and Running a Successful Developer Meetup

One of the most rewarding aspects of my career has been attending and then helping to run my local Apple developer meetup group. Meetup groups provide great learning opportunities but more importantly they provide great relationship opportunities for its members. In this talk I’ll share the story and lessons learned from running my local CocoaHeads chapter. After a quick review of the benefits and challenges of running a local developer group we’ll jump into actionable items for people starting, growing or running their own group. From defining success, to time expectations, marketing, sponsorship, planning content, tools and more. To close the session we’ll invite a few other group leaders from the audience to the front for a broad question and answer session about your specific issues and concerns. This talk is targeted at those who are running or would like to run a local developer meetup. It may also be helpful to those who attend a current group that needs guidance and/or focus.

If you are an iOS developer you should consider joining us. It’s going to be a great conference. Per CocoaHeads, use the coupon code “cocoacommunity” for 15% off all tickets.

CocoaConf DC 2016 Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 17:41:00 +0000

Had the pleasure to attend and speak at CocoaConf DC this past weekend.

CocoaConf is a touring training conference for iPhone, iPad, and Mac developers. We bring some of the best authors, trainers, and speakers to the most passionate, engaged developers in a region—together, they make magic!

CocoaConf draws anywhere from 100-120 developers. It’s a very nice, comfortable size. Large enough to host a diverse collection of personalities and ideas, but small enough not to feel overwhelming. People actively mingle and you get to meet lots of new faces without much effort.

This was my third CocoaConf, and first as a speaker. My own talk was at the end of the first day and I spent ample time the previous weeks preparing to avoid the need to do last minute slide updates and miss sessions — and I’m glad I did so.

The sessions were really good at this CocoaConf. Sure it helps that iOS 10 is just out and there is still lots to learn, but even the talks that were version agnostic, covering patterns, architectures and bug hunting skills all got my brain spinning with ideas.

One cool benefit of my work scheduling is now I have a week of stay-home vacation and I can hopefully direct that post-conference enthusiasm towards my side projects and some extra experimentation. Specific items on my list:

Do more interactive prototyping of my side project and follow up with some user interviews.
Do some experimentation with Perfect to build a simple Swift API and host it on Linode.
Continue to polish up my RanchWeather app and start a blog series reviewing the code patterns.
Do some experimentation with Twilio authentication in preparation for a web app project.
Inspired by the journalling abilities of MarkD, dedicate the vacation week to a journaling experiment: Daily Journal, Project Journal, Tool Journal.

As for my talk, I think it went very well. One thing I really like as a speaker is the conference not only has a session review system but they encourage submissions of reviews with a raffle for prizes at the end so you get a lot of feedback. Most of my talk’s feedback was very positive and I appreciate the criticisms, both good and bad. Always room for improvement.

So yeah, if you are considering attending or speaking at a CocoaConf, do it. It’s very rewarding and worthy of your time. If it’s on the east coast you’re more than likely to see me there too — and if so, say hi!

Join Us at CocoaConf DC, Sept 9-10th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:40:59 +0000

I’ve been to multiple CocoaConfs as an attendee and it’s with great pride I’m happy to say I’ll be a speaker at one soon.

CocoaConf is a traveling conference focused on Apple technologies that has been around since 2011. It’s big enough to have multiple tracks of content but small enough that you’ll have time to socialize with most of the other speakers and attendees throughout the event.

The 2016 “tour” is coming to a close. I’ll be speaking at the Washington DC CocoaConf (Sept 9-10) but if you are on the west coast you might want to consider San Jose, CocoaConf (Nov 4-5th).

When registering use code “COCOAHEADS” for 10% off!

I can’t wait to see everyone. If you will joining us, please come by and say hi. I’ll have some Big Nerd Ranch swag for ya.

Release Notes Conference Thoughts

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 16:38:42 +0000

This post is delayed due to a head cold I had last week, but considering the amount of effort and love that went into producing the Release Notes Conference I figured the least I can do is share my reaction.

In short, I think Joe and Charles have a really cool product here. Despite a somewhat saturated iOS conference space I think they have chiseled out a much needed and action-oriented event. The idea of an entire conference of content focused on building and growing your Apple-related business is great enough, but then consider you’ll end up mingling with similar minded people results in an incredible event.

I don’t want to understate the importance of actionable. There are a lot of tech conferences out there where you’ll see some very interesting talks that showcase some new language features or APIs but you can’t always come home and apply them to your current work right away. I think one of the best aspects of the Release Notes Conference is that no matter how young or old your business or product is, there were tons of actionable tasks to walk away with.

In many ways the conference reminded me fondly of the (pre-iPhone) MacSB (Mac Software Business) mailing list and IRC channel where a small group of us would hang out, post question and share notes. It was small, very welcoming and extremely helpful group.

My understanding is that the talks were recorded and will be published online, so if you are interested I highly recommend signing up for their mailing list for the announcement. Of course, if you aren’t subscribed already I’ll also recommend their weekly podcast which started it all.

CocoaLove 2015 Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:58:44 +0000

This weekend was the second annual CocoaLove event here in Philadelphia.

A conference about people, not tech. CocoaLove highlights the iOS/Mac community’s passions, challenges, and triumphs.

From all accounts, people had a great time. My very heartfelt “thank you” to the speakers, attendees and organizers for making it such a blast.

Some of my own takeaways and notes:

Just Do It! and more specifically, don’t let your high taste of quality hold you hostage from creating and shipping. Get it out in the world and improve it over time.
Don’t let the negativity of the web infect you. Be positive; be constructive.
Make time to help people out. Mentor them, teach them, guide them. It’s probably the most import work you’ll ever do.
Embrace today; do what you love; don’t settle.
Don’t let other people define your life’s scope. Poke life.
The world is in desperate need of good managers. Managers need not be robots; the best managers can have a huge impact on their team and the product.
Don’t let imposter syndrome or other people hold you back.
Humanizing the customer support experience is extremely important. These people are calling out for help, treat them right.
The developer ecosystem is forever changing. Even today the wheels are in motion and a few years from now it’ll be different. Be prepared for change.
Embrace side projects. Start tons of things. Experiment. Do things outside your comfort zone.

While we wait for this years talks to be edited and published, consider stopping by the 2014 video collection. In particular I recommend Joe Cieplinski – The Back of the Fence.

WWDC Events and Links

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 19:13:14 +0000

It’s June 1st and WWDC is right around the corner!

My wish list is set and I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about in the weeks and months ahead. It’s going to be a great conference.

I won’t be at WWDC proper this year but will be in town, next door at AltConf. AltConf has a great speaker lineup unto itself and I believe it will also be live streamed.

If you see me in town, please introduce yourself. I love connecting a face to a twitter avatar of a cat.

Other notes and resources…

As for the parties, one good index of events is right here: https://2015.wwdcparties.com/.

Big Nerd Ranch is also reaching out to meet our fans. We are hosting breakfast and dinner meetups. More info: https://twitter.com/bignerdranch/status/604034663150059522

And finally, if you’ll be in Philly instead of San Fransisco, consider attending the CocoaHeads keynote steam event at the Apple Store: http://www.meetup.com/PhillyCocoaHeads/events/222711398/

CocoaConf Boston 2014 Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 01:21:36 +0000

After getting a solid recommendation from Curtis, who attended the Washington DC variant, this weekend I headed north to CocoaConf Boston. It was my first CocoaConf and so I went into the weekend with a lot of blurred expectations.

Spoilers: I say first with intention. TLDR; I had a really great time. The talks and speaker quality were really high and with luck I’ll be able to attend again during a future “tour”.

One of my expectations was size. I thought the attendee count was going to be a bit larger. It felt like ~130 but I’m not sure what the official number was. Not that a small count is bad for me but I’m used to educational events hosting more. I suspect part of this is that CocoaConf is hosting lots more venues now (three arguably “east coast cities” during this fall tour alone). This may make some events smaller but overall a win for the community so as to have more access for those who can’t travel far.

One thing that continues to make me proud is the people of our community. The attendees, the speakers and the event staff of CocoaConf are all incredibly friendly, approachable and inspiring. Meeting new people and catching up with old friends is a big reason why I like attending conferences and CocoaConf does a great job at supplying the “campfire” atmosphere to make that happen.

![Daniel Jalkut’s “Quit Your Job” keynote][3]

As for my favorite talks I’ll mention a few:

[Daniel Jalkut’s][4] “Quit Your Job” keynote and [Rob Rhyne’s][5] “Make Them Care” session were both very inspirational. I leave Boston really hungry to jump into some side projects of mine and get back into the product game outside of my client stuff at work.

For technical wisdom I have to give it up for the full day “Swift Kickstart” workshop [Daniel Steinberg][6] ran as well as the Swift and Objective-C: Best Friends Forever session by [Jonathan Blocksom][7]. CocoaConf Boston is now cemented as the place and time where I really started to appreciate what Apple is trying to accomplish with Swift. This isn’t to say we aren’t in for a bumpy ride but at least now I have a good frame of mind as to the “why” behind it all.

Finally, it was great to meet the people that run CocoaConf. Rather than some large corporation, CocoaConf is actually a family affair. Dave Kline and his family run most of the operation and they seemed very dedicated to making sure everyone had a good time. For all their hard work I say thank you and hope to see you all again soon.

[3]: http://mikezornek.com/media/images/quit-your-job.png “Daniel Jalkut’s “Quit Your Job” keynote” [4]: https://twitter.com/danielpunkass [5]: https://twitter.com/capttaco [6]: https://twitter.com/dimsumthinking [7]: https://twitter.com/jblocksom

Quick CocoaLove Recap

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:35:46 +0000

CocoaLove was a huge success. All of the talks were well received and the attendee side conversations vibrant and interesting. I think I saw 2 laptops open all weekend which to me is a huge sign people were engaged with our content. If you missed out, check out the CocoaLove site for some highlights of our tweet/photo live stream.

While they’ll never capture the event in its full glory, we did record the presentations and will be editing them over the next few weeks to make the available on the web. To find out when the videos are up I’d signup to the mailing list or follow the @CocoaLoveConf twitter account.

I want to thank my fellow organizers, the speakers and the attendees for helping provide a weekend I’ll remember forever.

In particular I’ll give special props to Curtis whom sacrificed countless hours attending to hundreds of details that resulting in a level conference quality that is hard to achieve. Great job!

CocoaLove Tickets

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 01:02:47 +0000

It’s September, which means next month is October, which means CocoaLove is coming up fast!

We’ve got a great weekend planned and if you haven’t already secured your ticket I’d do so now since we are starting our last marketing push to sell out.

Additionally, if you or a company you know are interested in sponsoring to help show your support for CocoaLove let me know. CocoaLove is passion project from some great folks out of our local CocoaHeads chapter who have donated countless hours in helping to organize this incredible non-profit event. Sponsor support will help us reach our stretch goals and make an already great experience that much better.

See you all soon!

Week in Review: WWDC, E3 and CocoaHeads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:02:27 +0000

It’s been a crazy week. Some random notes and observations…

WWDC

Apple did a tremendous job streaming the Keynote. I watched it live on my Apple TV in the living room while chatting with friends on IRC and Twitter. It was awesome. As for the content, let’s review:

Mac OS X 10.9, Mavericks — Not a huge fan of the name. I liked Sea Lion! As for the user facing features, most are pretty meh for me, I will enjoy better dual monitor support. I also like the idea they are pushing iCloud Keychain and that it will suggest higher quality passwords for people. I myself will stick with 1Password but this is a great feature for users at large. The advanced tech of 10.9 looks great. Love the focus on battery life.

iOS 7 — I have very mixed feelings for the new UI. Some of it I like, some of it I don’t. Between the historic adoption rate of new versions of iOS and the complexity of delivering a consistent experience across iOS 6 and iOS 7, I can see many apps moving to iOS 7 only in the coming months, particularly ones that aren’t released yet.

While not reviewed in detail during the keynote, the real gems for me are in the developer tools and APIs released this week. Xcode 5 looks awesome. The new continuous integration services of OS X Server looks great (though time will tell if it can be a full on replacement for current solutions). Tons of brand new tech including: Text Kit, Sprite Kit, Game Controllers, UIKit Dynamics and better multitasking have been introduced along with some great improvements to current APIs. It’s going to be months until I have time to play with everything.

New Mac Pro — I’ve been a long time customer of the Mac Pro and was in the market for one in 2011 when I sadly, after continued uninspiring updates to the product line, had to settle for a loaded (max RAM / max Graphics Card / 256 SSD) iMac instead. Not to sound like a total dick, the iMac has been great and really fast but I still longed for the multi-drive, graphics card replaceable, mega ram slot tower that I was accustom to. So this new Mac Pro is actually in my eyes more of a loaded Mac mini style device. There is little chance you’ll be replacing these graphic cards (yes cards, it has two of them; probably to support the unannounced retina display this Mac Pro will probably ship along side with) and there doesn’t seem to be much room for extra internal hard disk space. That said, this machine’s stats looks awesome and I have been antsy for a retina display on the desktop. I’ll have to see a price tag before I commit myself but am happy I have options when it comes time to upgrade my current iMac.

There were also new Macbook Airs released at the show. I have and really enjoy my 13-inch Air and while the new extra battery life of these new models are probably very important for some people I am lucky enough to be able to plug-in when needed so will probably skip this generation. If it was a retina screen, maybe I’d change my tune.

Sessions — After the keynote, Apple, like they had promised, started publishing the session videos, usually less than 24 hours after they had been presented. By the end of the week we also had choices for HD or SD variants as well as the PDF slides. This helps take the sting out of not being able to acquire a ticket a lot and I thank Apple for putting forth the extra effort to do so.

E3

I haven’t been keeping up with E3 nearly as much as I have been Apple news, but seems like everyone had a great time out in LA. Playstation 4 announced it will not be following Microsoft’s lead and is promising very little DRM on the PS4 that will inhibit things like game sharing and used game sales. This, plus a cheaper price tag and arguably better under-the-hood tech has pushed itself to the top the console food chain. Time and games will tell how things end. For me, I’m not planning on a day one purchase. I’d like to see how things pan out and find a must have game to push me over the edge.

As for my Nintendo, for which I always have a love/hate relationship with, we saw a new Smash Bros, a new Super Mario 3D World, as well as lots of new info on the new 3DS Pokemon and Zelda titles.

Moving from back to front, I’m getting pretty jazzed for the new Pokemon. Even outside my previous fandom for the series, this new release has a lot of new elements to check out. Being a huge Link to the Past fan has me interested in this new sequel game though I’m still mixed on feelings of curiosity mixed with disappointment that they aren’t doing something more unique. I own Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS and it was not something I really enjoyed. The gameplay was very slow and continued use of the same old Mario platforming was exhausting. Considering the lack of interest New Super Mario Bros got as a Wii U title, you’d think they’d start to catch on that we need real NEW things but alas this seems lost on Nintendo. Finally, Smash Bros fans will inevitably enjoy a new release of Smash Bros. Even I get a little giddy seeing MegaMan added as playable character. Unfortunately I’m not a fighter fan. I no longer share a house with people to regularly play with and even when I do play these games at a party it becomes a button mash as no one knows all the moves. I think I’ve grown out of it. 🙁

CocoaHeads and our iOS 7 Hackday

On Thursday we had our usual monthly meeting for CocoaHeads. With the Apple event still in-progress there was lots of chatter about all the new stuff. When the meeting finally started we actually ended up with so many talks and demos we went over time. Reactive Cocoa in particular kept many a CocoaHead asking questions and thinking out of the box.

Saturday we held a hackday, our first CocoaHead event in some time. The hackday was focused on iOS 7 and had people work solo or team up to experiment with the latest API toys. Throughout the day we provided breakfast, snacks and a home made lunch from IndyHall’s own Kara LaFleur (@KaraLaFleur). At the end of the day we presented our results to the group and awarded book prizes from the Pragmatic Programmers and Big Nerd Ranch. All in all things went great and it was good to see some people attend who normally can’t make our nightly meetings.

Sunday Rest

It’s now Sunday and after an extremely busy week I’m relaxing. I do have plans to head out for some dinner later to wish my Mom to wish her a happy Father’s Day but otherwise am enjoying a lazy day around the apartment.

For all my Apple and gaming friends, I hope you enjoyed this week as well and enjoy the upcoming releases. Have fun!

Philly Startup Weekend

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:50:22 +0000

This weekend I got to take part in Philly Startup Weekend!

Startup Weekend is a world wide organization dedicated to hosting events to help educate and inspire entrepreneurs. The goal is to launch a startup in 54 hours. There have been several past Philly incarnations leading to some well known companies. I’ve always wanted to go but have had too many commitments. This weekend worked out and I’m glad it did.

The overall format is pretty self explanatory. For us there were about 110 attendees, 50 pitches, 16 projects selected based on a popular vote via stickers and then informal team formation. The teams worked on their new startup for the next two days with occasional drop-ins from local coaches to help out. The event hosts 4-minute presentations with 3-minutes of Q/A from the the judges for each project. Things closes with awards and a final party/mixer.

What I Liked

The attendees I interacted with were good people. No one there was slacking, nor did I see people looking to milk free work out of volunteers for their pet projects. Everyone genuinely seemed to be there to learn and do what they can to launch these startups.

The coaches that showed up were extremely helpful and provided great feedback as we matured our startups.

Overall, the whole event was a blast.

What I Didn’t Like

The venue / wifi. Once work started it was clear the organizers couldn’t support everyone on the main floor via wifi. Workbridge who is located in the same building was gracious enough to host moving a few teams up to their offices to help the congestion and while it did fix the wifi issue it also disrupted the “single open floor plan” which I think is extremely welcome for events like this.

The value in having an open floor is that you’ll overhear ideas and problems your fellow attendees are having and be able help each other out. It’s a great way to meet people and share ideas. On our 2nd floor space each team was isolated into their own offices so there wasn’t as much cross communication as I would have preferred. To balance things I took walking breaks back down to the main floor and talked with people. Even just having the ability to see the other team’s whiteboards was pretty interesting.

Some Take Aways

When you are given a project to do with a team of people, make sure you modify your plans to get the most out of these people and their skill set. Don’t get bogged down in that you are missing out on a specific developer or designer skill set. If you have someone who has experience with WordPress, figure out how to integrate WordPress into your solution. Make the most of what you have. Embrace constraints!

The overall entrepreneur community is maturing. I think it has been common to think that having a working prototype at the end of a weekend like this is a major goal however from my experience this weekend I was very pleased to see a larger percent of time focused on customer validation and the business model than code. More than working code what I think you need to at the end of the weekend is strong visualization of your product, and this need not be working code. I think UI renders or even a mocked up Keynote deck that fakes your website or app suffices. What you don’t want to do is let the complexities of the code implementation get in the way of prototyping different ideas during the weekend.

Our Project

I helped out with MentorShake, a website that aims to help connect mentors with students. Over the weekend during our validation we actually got back a lot of contradictory feedback from mentors on what they wanted and also struggled with the business model. By presentation time I think we ended up with a pretty good business plan and verbal commitments from over a dozen locals who were willing to be listed as mentors. Time will tell if the idea has legs but if you’re local to Philly and interested please sign up to the mailing list by visiting this page.

Thanks!

I’d like to again thank the organizers of the Philly Startup Weekend. It was a great time and I appreciate their hard work. If you are at all interested in this kind of thing I recommend you be on the lookout for a Startup Weekend in your area.

WWDC Student Scholarships

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:17:59 +0000

Regardless to the near instant sell out of WWDC 2013, if you are a student their is still hope! Apple runs a student scholarship program and the deadline this year is May 2nd. I attended my first WWDC on a student scholarship and met some great people.

If you can go, I highly recommend applying. Good luck.

LessConf Diversity

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:51:58 +0000

I read the following LessEverything blog post and tweeted:

Maybe the irony is lost on me but this reads like pretentious bullshit.

@stevenbristol askes:

it’s not at all meant to be. Can you tell me how?

Sure. Let’s tale a look…

You Are Welcome at LessConf, Please Come

The title is nice enough, grats on that one.

Considering this is the last LessConf and what a unique event it is, I’d like to send a special invitation to people not of “privilege” to attend.

I wonder what he means by “people not of ‘privilege’”? Like money? People who can’t afford to attend conferences?

Allan and I are certainly irreverent, sometimes crass, but we always try to included everyone.

irreverent (adjective): showing a lack of respect for people or things that are generally taken seriously

crass (adjective): lacking sensitivity, refinement, or intelligence

Yeah, I can see that.

And by “include everyone” of course he is referring to his conference that has people apply and only after deeming them worthy are they given the privilege of buying a ticket.

That’s how we’ve always been: You know the person at the office who is a bit weird or shy and no one ever invites to lunch? I always invite that person along for lunch. That’s just the kind of people we are.

Ok so now you are defining “people not of ‘privilege’” as people who aren’t social at work or deemed by you as “weird”. Seems off to me but moving on…

LessConf, like most conferences, is filled with white heterosexual men, “people of privilege.” And that’s great, except that it’s also not great.

Ah so people of privilege are “white heterosexual men” and you seem torn if this is great or not so great. I wonder what he means by all this. I hope he explains. (Spoiler: He doesn’t.)

We would like to extend a special invitation to persons who are not white heterosexual men to join us.

I’m no English major but doesn’t that statement mean the invitation is still reserved for heterosexual men of the non-white denomination?

More to the point, using a phrase like “not white heterosexual men” to group the “diversity” you are looking to bring into a conference community is pretty tasteless in my opinion.

LessConf should be a place where all people feel free to be themselves; where everyone is loved and accepted and safe.

And appreciated gratuitous use of the word “and”.

I don’t care who you are or where you fit in, I would like you to fit in at LessConf. Here’s a coupon for $100 off the price of the ticket. LessConfLovesMeTheWayIAm

Please do come and feel safe to be and express who you are.

This is from LessConf 2012: (A photo of what I assume is a group of white heterosexual men hugging.)

If adding diversity to your conference was a real goal you wouldn’t announce it mere weeks before it opened. The whole thing smells like you haven’t sold out and are trying to use the “diversity” angle to sell more tickets, and very poorly at that.

Best I can tell this conference is something you hand made, picking the speakers, picking the attendees. If it’s not diverse you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Here’s an idea if you really want a diverse conference get people of diverse backgrounds to be on the planning committee. Let them attract a diverse speaker roster. Let the diverse speaker roster help attract a diverse audience.

Maybe Steven and company do want a diverse conference but I have to say making moves this late in the game with the above post is a pretty poor attempt.

SecondConf 2012 Notes

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 03:20:15 +0000

For those who might not be familiar, SecondConf is a Chicago-based weekend conference that describes itself as:

An annual gathering of technologists passionate about creating great things.

Well-crafted products, delightful experiences, enduring companies, research, journalism, education. Great things take many forms. We explore them all.

While certainly not Apple exclusive, I think it’s a mistake to omit that the majority of the attendees have an Apple development background. SecondConf itself has inspirations from previous local Apple-oriented conferences: C4 and, previous to that, MacHack. I myself was a sporadic attendee of both C4 and MacHack and this was my second SecondConf of the three they’ve had.

While “going indie” could accurately describe the overall feeling of previous years, this year’s SecondConf felt more centered around creativity. Additionally, many sessions broke from the traditional programming and business topics to cover hardware development and electronic music.

A full session list can be found on the SecondConf website and, while I enjoyed a lot of the talks, I must limit my coverage to a few favorites.

Robots!

Erin Kennedy (@RobotGrrl)

I’m not much of a hardware guy, but Erin Kennedy’s talk was really fun and inspirational. Erin is probably the most humble person I’ve met, and the stuff she is doing with her RoboBirds is really impressive. I hear she’s working on construction kits and may even have a Kickstarter project soon. Follow her on Twitter or sign up for her mailing list to learn more.

Blitz Talks

A blitz or lightning talk format is 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, with software that automates the presentation.

Creating Custom Bounce Animations with Math!

Soroush Khanlou (@khanlou)

Securing Your Customers’ Privacy

Aijaz Ansari (@\_aijaz\_)

I can honestly say from my own experiences that doing blitz talks are almost harder than full 45 minute sessions. The above two sessions by Soroush and Aijaz were really well done. In fact, they hit a great sweet spot by taking their limited time to explain a problem, outline the current solution, and then provide alternative solutions with real code that people can use today.

Photos

I didn’t take too many pictures, but these fine people have shared a few.

Videos

Like previous years, many of the sessions (minus the Panel and Dr. Wave’s talk) were recorded and should be available online in the near future.