CoderFaire in the ATL
With Mashery offices in San Francisco, New York and Boston, it's easy for us to find tech meetups and hackathons on any given day. However, we also enjoy getting on the ground in burgeoning developer markets, where we know developers exist in pockets and silos, but aren't regularly mixing it up across verticals. Just last weekend, I set off for Atlanta to attend CoderFaire, a two-day developer event packed with learning and coding. This was the second installment of CoderFaire, with the first taking place in Nashville in fall of 2012.
Keynote and Sessions On Saturday (4/20), CoderFaire kicked off with a keynote talk by Ben Ramsey (@ramsey) titled "Developing Intuition: How to Think Like a Software Architect." He walked us through his career as a developer, and how it has lead him into software architecture. The gist I got from Ben's talk was the importance on slowing down your brain, taking time to know where you are in a project, and to validate that what you're working on is relevant to the problem.
The rest of the day was chock full of content spread across three tracks. Talks ranged from API design best practices, mobile development, application security to data modeling. The topics were incredibly diverse and expertise ran deep. Mix those in with southern hospitality and warm geeky humor, and the outcome was a learning experience that rivaled many large-scale events in bigger markets. CoderFaire felt like a well-organized mega-Meetup -- personable, intimate and surrounded by others who are excited to learn new things.
I caught Fred Alger's (@_phred) talk on app security, titled "Web Security: the OWASP top 10 and you!" Fred covered the OWASP "Top 10" which I think we all need to spend more time digging into. Some of the exploits that he covered included: XSS, CSRF, broken sessions, bad crypto, SQL injections, etc.
I also sat in on Keith Casey's (@caseysoftware) talk on REST titled, "REST BEST Practices." There are plenty of decks and videos of Keith giving his talk that you can find on Google. Keith works at Twilio, and he often refers to their API design in his examples. He covered best practices to regards to: versioning, verbs and the expected/unexpected actions/responses, discovery/HATEOAS/Hypermedia, etc. There was a lot of great information for both API providers and developers.
 The Hackathon The next day (4/21) was dedicated to the hackathon. Keith Casey (@caseysoftware), developer evangelist at Twilio (@Twilio), was the emcee. After brief sponsor introductions and platform/service demos, the developers set off to brainstorm, collaborate and start hacking on their various hacks.
The teams has about 8 hours to build their apps from scratch. At the end of the day, we had a handful of interesting hacks and demos. Here's a few notable hacks that caught my fancy:
"Pandora to Rdio" by Jonathan Hill (@compwright) -- imports your Pandora stations into your Rdio account. Jonathan explained that has been using Pandora for years, and that his channels and likes are a reflection of his true music listening taste. However, he enjoys the on-demand capabilities that Rdio provides. His hack scrapes (wince) his Pandora data and dynamically creates playlists on Rdio using their API (cheer). Jonathan was awarded an Apple TV for best use of a Mashery Network API.
"Medicine Reminder" by David Deriso (@davidderiso) and Isaiah Banks keeps you on track for taking your prescription medications. David's inspiration came from personal experiences, dealing with the challenges of his parents' complex prescription medication schedules. His team used the GoodRx API that's provided through the Aetna CarePass platform to obtain pertinent drug information, including images of the meds. This team also won the Mashery prize for best use of a Mashery Network API, taking home a set of Apple TVs. (couldn't choose, so they both won). In fact, this team won the best in show prize as selected by the organizers, giving them all their choice of a JetBrains product license (of their choice).
"Truth or Dare Cube" was a game hacked in pure HTML/CSS3. The inspiration? Wanting to learn how to build animations with just CSS3 transforms, and coaxing the crowd into awkward confessions. If you haven't looked at CSS3 Transforms, you'll be pleasantly surprised with how smooth you can animate elements with very little code.
Until next time, Atlanta CoderFaire successfully brought together Atlanta's diverse tech communities, including entrepreneur hackers, enterprise architects and seasoned business folks. Cross pollination like this is exactly what needs to happen for Atlanta to become a magnet city for future tech talent and opportunities. We're looking forward to putting our feet on the ground at more Atlanta tech events.
Props to the organizers, EICC -- Cal Evans, Kathy Evans, Jacques Woodcock, Chris Spruck and Kevin Roberts. Also, thanks to the sponsors -- MailChimp, Github, Basho, JetBrains, 10gen, New Relic, Mediacurrent, WilderMinds, MySQL, Develop with Purpose, Thompson Technologies and Beaufort Fairmont. See you at the next CoderFaire in Nashville! (dates TBD)
