Saturday, June 25, 2011 -

On a beautiful Saturday in Chicago,  I had the opportunity of attending the Ji-V Hackathon II at Ascend Training in downtown Chicago. It was a day filled with great speakers, fantastic sponsors, and a great turnout of attendees. Roundarch was represented by Ben Bryan, Shaun Husain, Burton Podczerwinski, and me (Juan Bonfante). This is the second Ji-V Hackathon I’ve attended this year, difference being Roundarch was a silver sponsor for the hackathon this time around. This event brings together some of Chicago’s best and brightest developers, students, and entrepreneurs; although the Chicago mobile/technology community is not as large as what you would find in other cities like New York, the event was a welcome reminder that the Chicago community is growing quite rapidly and the amount of talent just keeps getting better.

Juan & Ji Kim Lucas (event organizer... The Ji in Ji-V)

Ben Bryan showcased the use of the Android NDK to access lo-level device API’s which allows him to integrate C/C++ libraries with Android; It was an extremely insightful presentation, and his demo gave us a hint at the power of the NDK, by creating a small app that did sound analysis and manipulation, while creating multiple threads to pipe the different sound streams into each thread. The real power of the demo was how easily he could use it create sound effects such as reverb in real-time.  You can check out the code here.

Juan & Ben

Shaun and Burton also did a great presentation, where they showed the use of a IOIO (pronounced YOYO) board, and the Android SDK to create an autonomous RC Car. By tying together multiple infrared sersors and a couple of servos they were able to create an RC car that for the most part can drive itself, they need to work on the breaking system a little, but what they accomplished in less than a week is quite impressive. You can head over to their YouTube Channel to see a video they put together of their creation.

I on the other hand had the pleasure of being a moderator for one of the panel discussions throughout the day, along with Uki D. Lucas who’s a Technical Architect for Sears and the founder of ChicagoAndroid.com; as well as Jason Shah who is the VP of Product Management and Engineering at Mediafly, Inc. The panel consisted of: Moshe Tamssot Founder of MonksOfInvention.com and Managing Partner at InnovationCenter.com, Brendan Kenny who works for Google on the Maps API team doing Developer Relations, Michael Labriola who is an RIA Evangelist and Adobe Community Professional working with Digital Primates, Paul Bernhardt who is an Application Development Consultant at Reasearch In Motion (RIM), and Jason Goodrich who is the founder of A Space Apart and Leasabl. The panelist answered questions regarding a wide breath of topics, including but not limited to UI/UX impact on future applications, web versus mobile applications, Near Field Communication (NFC) & RFID, and Android. The panelist all shared their ideas on these topics, and it was very interesting to see how different companies/technologies are approaching the same problems, in completely different ways; RIM for example, showed how their new OS is intended to be a developer friendly as possible by allowing Developers of various disciplines to create applications very easily. While on a more futurist topic, where they saw the mobile device market headed, Mike Labriola mentioned that what would be nice to see in the future is the disappearance of a device altogether; while purely theoretical the solution he described wouldn’t involve anyone becoming a cyborg anytime soon, but more of a device that would be closer to an article of clothing rather then a peripheral.

Panelists

At the end of the day, there was two more unexpected surprises (although they were on the schedule… These aren’t necessarily what you would expect when going to a Hackathon on a Saturday): The first was a Flamenco dance presentation, the second a demo of Wushu Martial Arts, both extremely well put together as well as exciting to watch. This was followed the awards ceremony for the Hackathon contestants; The silver prize of $500, provided by Roundarch, was awarded to the KeyLimeTie team consisting of Jennifer Wittman, Austin Palanca, Andrew C, Richie Peters, and Tim Courtney.  Congratulations to the KeyLimeTie team for all of your hard work!

Team KeyLimeTie

Overall I’d like to thank the event organizers Ji Kim Lucas and Veronica Ludwig for putting together a great event, it couldn’t be possible without them. Would also like to thank all of the attendees, and the speakers who came out for making the event a great success. Finally thanks to Ramon De Leon the marketing mind of Six Domino’s Pizza stores in Chicago, for a very tasty lunch.

Last month Adobe Evangelist Kevin Hoyt was in town to speak at the Adobe Flash User Group in Chicago, and after a great presentation about the future of the Flash platform inside of the mobile space, we headed over to the Billy Goat II, for a Roundarch sponsored Chicago Dev Happy Hour. The happy hour gave any attendee of the user group another chance to interact with the speakers as well as other members. This gave everyone a chance to ask the community experts questions which they may have not gotten a chance to during the earlier sessions. While speaking with Kevin Hoyt he mentioned that Roundarch was one of Adobe’s partners that spends a lot of effort staffing user experience experts on all of our projects, and we agree. During the happy hour I also had a chance to catch up with eFactory’s Michael Epstein, who is also the Chicago Adobe Flash User Group organizer; expect some talks in the near future from some Roundarch crew.

Chicago Developers Happy Hour, occurs once a month, and anyone is welcome. The main purpose is to share ideas, and free beer generally helps; you’re also in a room full of amazing developers so it’s also a good place to be inspired. If you want to stay up to date on their events check out their meet-up page http://www.meetup.com/chicagodev/

You can find out more info on future events for the Chicago Adobe User Group at: Chicagoflex.org

Preface:
Although he may have stopped reminding me Pek (Pongpaet) has been wanting me to share my experience at Flash In The Can (FITC) Toronto, well I told him I would, but I’ve been stalling since I’ve had something in the works with Brendan Lee from Ribbit… but let me regress: (Events not in Chronological Order)
@the Keynote Richard Galvan from Adobe said all the presentations from the conference would be up on tv.adobe.com… I’m still waiting. FITC seems they will also put up video’s of all the talks on their site, which I’m guessing they’re still under production, so I eagerly await.

Reaching Out And Touching Someone:
On the second day of the conference, April 27th, I got a call from Brendan at around 11am, at this point I knew him for close to 24 hours, he tells me to meet him by the Ribbit booth, he needs some help with something in Papervision3D. Through my excitement I step out of Ralph Hauwert’s “Professionally Pushing Pixels” (sorry Ralph), and I find Brendan hunched over his MacBook Pro, intently typing away, takes a quick glance at me, then just tells me he’s trying to finish a demo so we can put it into Chuck’s (Charles Freedman) presentation at 4pm. Here begins our adventure in XP (Extreme Programming).

I look over his shoulder and he show’s me what he’s working with. Its a few blocks of Augmented Reality(AR) code in Flex Builder. Tells me the basic idea, and I’m immediately psyched! At this point I’m sitting on my knees on the conference floor, still looking over his shoulder catching any errors, while at the same time suggesting the best route of attack from my perspective. At some point we switch I start coding away, and he takes my role. We continue going; doing our floor to seat swap for about an hour, completely oblivious to the hordes of people passing by as they move from one session to the next. We hit up the hotel’s lobby restaurant/bar for lunch, and continue our adventures in XP as we inhale Bison Burgers (which were delicious). Unluckily we didn’t get to finish in time for Chuck’s presentation; but during Chuck’s presentation he mentioned Roundarch with his Merapi/Ribbit Demo, and gave many thanks to Adam Flater for helping him out with the Merapi code for his demo. Brendan and I decided we would come back to our demo at a later time.

(If you want to get to the butter of my story just hop over to Ribbit’s Blog)

The third and final day of the conference, Brendan walked up to me towards the end of the day and asked me if I wanted to finish polishing off the application, I of course said yes. We went up the executive lounge on the top floor of the Hilton, and having an amazing view of city, accompanied by an equally amazing sunset, we began to code. The whole time while hanging out with Brendan he excitedly spoke of his wife and kids, and said I should meet them, they’re super-cool. I figured it would be a great chance for me to get out to the west coast and catch some California sun, but technology one-upped me. She sent him a video-chat invitation on Skype. I found this truly amazing, technology once again connecting people in completely different corners of the world. I had seriously been considering flying out to the California (and still am) just so I could meet his family, and hang out with them, but I got to meet them online first. It was by chance, but getting to see his kids climb over his wife, and poke at the screen at this stranger standing next to their father was truly amazing. I said hello, and apologized to Brendan’s wife, Christine, for taking up all of Brendan’s time trying to pump out this idea. I walked away for some time so he could take some time with his Family. We took a break and had dinner after.

After dinner we met Chris Allen |CEO/Founder of|  Infrared 5 and another friend Marsy Shattuck from Discovery Channel, and they wondered if we were going to the final FITC party that night? I had full intentions on going, Brendan I think was probably partied out, but I told them I would meet them there. Some time later Brendan and I were doing our little experiment with XP up in my hotel room, he was on his laptop, I was on mine both trying to solve different issues with the application; I looked at my watch and came to realize it was nearly 2AM, we’d spent the entire night coding! While everyone partied we coded, talk about dedication. We still didn’t get everything done that evening, so we figured it’d be best if we just collaborated on the project once we were back at our respective homes.

A week later we were back at it, this time using GotoMeeting. He was at home in San Francisco, I was in my apartment here in Chicago. We logged onto Goto, and started screen sharing, eventually taking over each other’s screens and coding while one of us took a break either to just watch, or in Brendan’s case got up and played with his kids. This experience was extraordinary, I can’t say that before this I’ve ever done XP with someone who wasn’t even in the same city as I was, but it was a fantastic learning experience. You can see the results here. Because of all of our efforts Brendan asked if I wanted to speak with him at a few upcoming conferences: 1. Flash on Tap (Boston) (Not confirmed, but in the works) 2: CAT(Creativity and Technology – New York)

Meeting People and Networking:
I met A LOT of people while at FITC! I found this to be one of the greatest benefits of the conference, put me in a room with a wide array of creative and intelligent people and I’m going to start talking. When I arrived at the Hilton on Saturday, April 25th, there were some workshops going on, the one that was of particular interest to me was one being held by Lee Fraser and Louis Marcoux of Autodesk. Louis is an expert in 3D Studio Max, while Lee is a Maya expert. I had a great chat with both of them about the 3D space in relation to the web, and more specifically with Flash. I was a little more drawn to Lee since my recent involvement with AwayBuilder and Away3D. AwayBuilder is an AS3 library for importing scene’s directly from Maya, then rendered in Flash through the Away3D Engine. The next day, I found Lee at his booth and got to show him a few more examples of what I meant, and gave him a few reason’s why Autodesk might want to jump into the Away3D ocean (although they already have wet their feet with Project Dragonfly).  In return for talking code to Lee, he showed me some REALLY cool features of Maya, I had no idea I could be using. He really simplified Maya for me. Thanks Lee!

I then met with Michael Plank, FDT evangelist for PowerFlasher. I was meeting Michael for the first time, and we sat down and talked code, best practices and FDT for about an hour, or until the battery on my laptop died. I was meeting Michael since he would be giving Roundarch a presentation about FDT on Monday, May 4th. The really cool thing about this presentation is that he would be doing it from Germany, over GotoMeeting, talk about global telecommunications. (Fast Forward>>)The presentation was received very well, and although I’m already a religious user of FDT, we had a few conversions from the Flex world.

Apart from that there’s a lot of people who I want to write equally as lengthy descriptions of our experiences but I fear this blog post is getting a tad bit long. So not to belittle their importance I’m just gonna do it laundry list style:

• Chris Allen, CEO of Infrared 5. I got to hang out quite a bit with Chris, and although I had previously met him (last year @Flashbelt), I got to know him much better this time around.
• Steven Sachs, creator of Gaia Framework for Flash. If you’re a Flash Developer and you don’t know what Gaia is, then well go learn about it. I’ve been utilizing it now for over 8 months, and it’s a thing of beauty.
• Jerry Chabolla CTO/Co-Founder of Influxis
• Mike Hansen of Moosesyrup.com. He’s an awesome designer.
• Chuck Freedman of Ribbit | Blog- Get Microphone
• R Blank of Rich Media Institute(RMI)

I’m sure I missed a few people, not on purpose I swear! I definitely have to thank the organizers of FITC for putting on an amazing event. I’d like to thank all of the Speakers, even the ones I didn’t get to see, I know my post doesn’t say much about any of the talks, but I’m hoping the video’s for the conference come up, and you don’t have to get my second hand account; there were a lot of talks I would’ve loved to see and can’t wait to see when they’re finally online. Here’s a few tiny snapshots, see you again next year?