Edgar Catalán

Deciding which events to attend while being on the bay area is becoming a little bit difficult for me recently, ranging from cultural/art/concert events to technical/startup and the more IT related ones. I'm glad that I have such variety to choose from,  here is just an example of it:

I've just registered to a bunch of technical talks that look very promising, all of them being offered on the AWS Pop-up Loft event. I've chosen this list because most of them are conveniently scheduled on the evening (there are more too choose from on the event site), and of course because of the topics, just take a look:

Technical talks:

The Future of IT:  "Startups at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory" (Wednesday, Oct 01, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with Runscope – "Scale-Oriented Architecture"(Thursday, Oct 02, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with NPM – “Using Service-Oriented Architecture to Scale Better” (Thursday, Oct 09, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

"Advanced Data Modeling and Scaling on Amazon DynamoDB" (Monday, Oct 13, 2014 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with Jaspersoft – “Reporting and Analytics: Success in the Cloud and Acquisition by TIBCO" (Tuesday, Oct 14, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with CircleCI – "The Many Ways of Continuous Deployment" (Thursday, Oct 16, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

"Building an iOS App using Cross-platform AWS Mobile Services - Cognito, Analytics and SNS" (Monday, Oct 20, 2014 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

"Build an Android Game in the Cloud Using Cross-platform AWS Mobile Services- Cognito, Analytics and SNS" (Tuesday, Oct 21, 2014 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

"Getting Started with AWS Services Connectors - S3, DynamoDB and Kinesis" (Wednesday, Oct 22, 2014 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with Lyft – “Configuration Management and Orchestration for AWS: Salt or Ansible” (Thursday, Oct 23, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

Building an iOS App using Cross-platform AWS Mobile Services - Cognito, Analytics and SNS (Date:Monday, Oct 27, 2014 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

Building and Scaling Your Game in the Cloud - AWS Cognito, Analytics and SNS (Tuesday, Oct 28, 2014 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

Cross-platform development with cross-platform services – Deep dive on Xamarin and AWS Mobile Services (Wednesday, Oct 29, 2014 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with Librato – “Metrics Driven Development” (Thursday, Oct 30, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

Behind the Scenes with Cotap – “Architecting for the Cloud: Hoping for the Best, Prepared for the Worst" (Tuesday, Nov 04, 2014 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM)

I will attend to some of them and publish my notes/thoughts here for reference. Most of the "Ask an architect" sessions are full already, I'm not sure if I will attend to one of those ones, but it's definitely worth trying.

So far (and for a long time), I have been procrastinating about creating a blog, and I don't know exactly why, since I really like the concept of people posting ideas and getting social about them, sharing ideas is really cool stuff, and its even cooler when you start originating them =).

Considering myself a creative person, and recently (a little more) inspired, I've decided to start sharing my ideas, which so far I've just written down into a bunch of ".txt" files, spread over my documents, and sketched on endless amounts of papers/post-it notes that commonly ended up in the garbage after a cleaning weekend at home.

I'm not saying I always have good ideas, but that's very subjective, and what I will try to do here is post things I found interesting, and some of the random thoughts/ideas I tend to think of. After all, having a place to track and reference them easily, is a good idea to begin with ;)

Trying to keep this short, I just want to remember myself that before starting with this I was dealing with the questions that probably every mexican geek blogger ask himself (at the beginning) such as:

"Which language to use?"

"What blogging platform should I install/use?"

"What writing format should I use?"

"What topics should I write about?"

For the record, this is how I answered them, and why:

English, broader audience, topics relevance, and yes, to practice.

Tumblr, ease of use, nice themes and "plugins".

Informal, easy reading, but trying a very good structure.

Software, music, math, challenges, traveling (In a future  post I will elaborate more).

Since this post is more like "Meta" (talking about the blog itself), I'm listing here the Tumblr themes I liked the most (for reference) because of its cool look (simplicity), I'm going to be experimenting with them until I find the best for my needs:

Showroom

Papercut

Atonement v2.0

Pink touch 2

Simple things

Royal Ribbon

Lightweight