Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : experiences

More F# At Code Camp Hartford

RickM — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:03:00 GMT

I am down in Bloomfield, CT today at Hartford CodeCamp which has been put on by the Connecticut .NET Developer's Group . I just gave a very similar version my talk on the 5th. The room was completely full and I was a bit weak and foggy from my recent...(read more)

Talkin Bout' F# - Presenting at the Western Mass .NET Users's Group

RickM — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:36:00 GMT

I'm going to be giving a presentation at the my local .NET User's group tonight. The goal of my talk will be to expose the audience to F# as well as some Functional Programming Ideas. Here's a basic rundown of what the talk is about (in order): - What...(read more)

IPCV 08' Part 2 - Novel Approaches

RickM — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:15:00 GMT

I've managed to rig up Steve's cell to my laptop and I once again have Internet Access. From the time of my last post, most of the talks have been about applications of machine learning. This usually involves a neural network, PCA (Principle Component...(read more)

IPCV 08' - Day One Through One Point Five Rundown

RickM — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:03:00 GMT

As you might have seen in Steve's Blog , we ended up getting stranded in Milwaukee overnight and missed most of the keynotes. We did manage to catch the last one which was on a company called Element CXI's very interesting reconfigurable hardware model....(read more)

20 Years Later IRC is Still Useful; Are You Taking Advantage of it?

RickM — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:23:00 GMT

This upcoming August the IRC protocol will officially be 20 years old. I think anyone would agree that it has weathered the years better than any other high level internet protocol. It does not suffer from the spam and abuse that have overtaken other...(read more)

10 Hours in F#: Exploring Concurrency Through An Ant Colony Simulation

RickM — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:33:00 GMT

Synopsis I gave an hour long talk today, here at Atalasoft, on Concurrency in F# . It featured some slides and a small ant colony simulation to demonstrate different kinds of threading. Overall, I liked developing in F# quite a bit; however, puzzling...(read more)

Code Camp 9 in Waltham, a Retrospective

RickM — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:02:00 GMT

I went to my first Code Camp this weekend. I was a bit wary at first because it was hosted by Microsoft and I hate Corporate Kool-Aid. Thankfully, that was kept to a minimum and the focus was where it should be: on the code. All of the panels I went to...(read more)

AIIM Rundown

RickM — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:19:00 GMT

The first thing I did at AIIM was to attend the second day keynote with David Pogue and Matthew Glotzbach.
David Pogue really entertained well. I enjoyed his wordless slides and entertaining banter. However, I didn't take away much from his presentation.
Matthew Glotzbach on the other hand was not nearly as entertaining but was much more informative. In particular, I was really impressed with his demonstration of Google's excel clone. I've used it a bit in the past and was left unimpressed. At the time I didn't realize that it is just loaded with intelligent features based on google search technology. It can dynamically generate cells based on google querys as well as infer cell values. I think just about anyone can see how hugely useful this could be.

We saw an overwhelming amount of interest at AIM. Our booth was constantly swarming with people. Our WII giveaways were also a huge hit. Eric really came through on grabbing them up before the show. This was my first time being in a booth at a tradeshow. Being able to talk to customers as well as people interested in purchasing our ECMi toolkit was really interesting. It was a big change in perspective to meet customers in person and hear about their needs.

Hearing the keynote speakers talk about similicity really cemented the idea in my head. When I was talking to customers it was obvious that what they really wanted was to be able to build and deploy custom apps as quickly and easily as possible. The overarching message I got from AIIM was clear: Simplicity is Key.