Boulder Tech Meetup and Good Folks
Tonight was the second installment of the Boulder Tech Meetup and it was very interesting… I got to hook up with a ton of folks who I have met over the years through the Boulder/Denver tech scene and see some cool demos. It was a full house - there were a bunch of people jammed into the confrence room.
My buddies from id345, Danny and Austin, made the trip up from Denver. I am sure they are out now as I write this tearing up the late night Boulder scene. These guys just ooze with energy, brilliance, and excitement. Also on hand were Adam, the authority for biotech in Colorado, and Dave, from the Onion fame, two smart and motivated good buddies of mine.  Adam, Dave, and I went out for coffee after the gathering – that’s our beverage of choice.
Ask Dave Taylor was on hand to answer and ask questions – I owe Dave a t-shirt btw. Dave what do you really think about Agile??? Dave is impressive. CEO of Six88, Jason Eckenroth (we go back to our days at CU) was there as well. Jason is a sharp dude and one heck of a nice guy. Peter and Liz from 5o9inc were in the house – Peter was quiet; he must have been tired 
Joe Pezzillo was first to demo… Joe is a super cool and smart cat and proud new poppa – lil’ Pascal is very cute. Joe showed Anthracite – a very slick app. Anthracite is a powerful utility for mining web data and processing text. Of course, the output of the processing can be an RSS feed ready to be consumed in a NewsGator product!  BTW, Joe and I are organizing Barcamp Boulder which will be rolling in early November. Stay tuned for more info on that.
Dave Cohen, who helped get me started in this whole software mess many moons ago, showed off Earfeeder. If you are into music, you gotta check this out. It is awesome. Earfeeder figures out your musical interest based on your existing collection and serves up RSS feeds with new release info, concert info, and other important info about your favorite artists. Dave fired up NetNewsWire to consume his Earfeeder feed. Go NewsGator once again! Rolling Stone and iTunes are a few of the sources that feed EarFeeder. Check it out… There’s an interesting side story here with Dave and I. When I was in graduate school, I was a Linux snob and didn’t get introduced to the world of Windows programming until I started working for Dave’s startup after seeing his mug in the local paper. Funny thing, I am now mostly a Windows/.NET programmer and Dave is now all about LAMP (well he calls it LAMJ w/ Java replacing php)… in a few years it’ll be interesting to see what development tools we are using.
Alex Komarnitsky showed how he pulled of wiring his Xmas lights for remote control. This project has garnered a ton of press locally and nationally over the last few years and Alex has done a great job leveraging this press to help raise money for an affliction that his kids suffer from – that’s cool! Yeh, you guessed it, I have a connection to Alex too. I took a software engineering class with his brother Mike (who I learned is now an MBA grad) and also built a search routine (in Perl) for one of Mike’s web sites back in the day (it’s the search dealio in the bottom right corner of the home page - glad to see it is still in production many years later).
Jean McAuliffe talked about Agile development - a technique used at NewsGator.
I am always reminded how small the world is… especially in the tech space. There are a bunch of smart and interesting people in and around Boulder – it’s cool to get a bunch of those folks in one room. Many thanks to Medium for putting this on (looking forward to the Medium demo next month)!
7 comments October 4th, 2006