#gluecon

Set in the idyllic locale of Bloomfield, Colorado, the GlueCon conference highlights security, APIs, cloud, and mobile tech trends. The twist? When Eric and Kim Norlin created this event five years ago, they focused on making developers the stars of GlueCon. From everything the NodeFly team saw at the con on May 22-23, they have definitely succeeded. 

An enthusiastic and curious group of 600 attendees drank in keynote speeches and breakout sessions to learn, build upon their core knowledge, share their experiences and practice existing and newfound skills. This meant informative presentations and sidebar discussions that spilled out of the rooms and into the halls and even the pubs. And of course there were many opportunities for networking and comparing products, business ideas and strategies.

NodeFly shared booth space with StrongLoop during the conference (you can see Matt from StrongLoop and Glen from NodeFly during a quieter moment above). Both companies talked about the power of Node.js and their prospective offerings. StrongLoop provides its own Node.js distribution as well as support and consulting to ensure that you have help in making your Node.js product work. NodeFly, of course, provides product visibility via its agent dashboard to allow you real-time awareness of how your product is performing. Everyone at the booth, whether from NodeFly or StrongLoop, was generous in describing the benefits of each other’s product or pointing people to other booths or products that might help them.

The NodeFly team was delighted to tell people about our agent dashboard as well as our future plans for UI and improved data visibility. But we were just as excited to chat with other GlueCon attendees to discuss their products and apps (whether built with Node.js or not) and to discuss the pros and cons of Node.js and its myriad intricacies.

Of course, in addition to all of this we needed sustenance and entertainment. Luckily, there was food and drinks a’plenty. We had a taste of local barbecue, yummy deserts, coffee to power us through, and great hospitality from the team at the Omni Hotel.

CloudCamp The other week I was in Denver for CloudCamp at the Omni Interlocken Hotel. CloudCamp is an unconference where "early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas." My lightning talk on cloud-based developer-focused tools struck a chord with several people, so we continued the conversation around the issue of API developer tools for two breakout sessions. I led discussions covering schemas, documentation, development and debugging tools that we found useful for today's API platform driven development. I also led a breakout talk on security/compliance in the cloud. We shared our experience and stories regarding PCI and HIPAA. (Mashery has been recognized as a PCI compliant by MasterCard since 2011)

Glue Conference The next day, the Glue Conference kicked off at the very same venue. From a developer's perspective, there were a lot of information packed sessions on APIs, working with Hadoop and various NoSQL engines, real-time data, and mobile development. One key takeaway is that IaaS and PaaS providers are fiercely competing to appeal to both SMB and enterprise, rolling in the latest database platforms and hardware infrastructure with the promise of scalability and high availability. For example, Amazon offers DynamoDB on AWS and Microsoft has moved all of its storage to SSD on Azure.

GlueCon Hackathon Mashery also sponsored the hackathon that ran during GlueCon. Hackathons that run in parallel with conferences are usually pretty tough to pull off. However, about 10 teams started out the competition, and at the end of the next day, 8 apps were submitted complete with live demos. Below is a list of apps that were built using Mashery Network APIs:

Locational Real Estate - developed by Dan Moore. Dan's web app would find local real estate listings on Craigslist via the 3taps API and cross-reference US Census data from the USA TODAY Census API. He It was built using mostly Javascript (jQuery) and he also managed to use appMobi XDK to compile it as native Android.

FlicksAt - developed by Prabhu Velayutham, Dave Fauth and Lou Paglia. This team's app takes movie recommendations to a whole new level. Rather than just suggesting films to friends, you can now push movies directly into their Netflix queue. The app was built using Node.js, some Java, and on top of the Netflix and Rovi Cloud Services APIs.

Rain Gauge - developed by Jeremy Haberman. Leveraging the WeatherBug API, Jeremy built a native Android app in Java to help him determine whether or not he needs to water his lawn. His app collects and reports rainfall data from the nearest weather station.

Tasteful Movies - developed by Nathan Faubion and Jeff Olchovy. Their app, built in Python and Javascript, pairs delicious meals with films. Simply provide their app with the name of one or more ingredients, and their app will present a series of dinner recipes. Once you select one of those recipes, Tasteful Movies uses secret sauce to pair a movie, using the Netflix API.

Last Sunday, Jonathan saw Brad Feld retweet this:

It didn't take us long to respond.  Glue is a 2 day technology conference.

Glue is about all of the bits and pieces, APIs and meta-data, standards and connectors that will help us to glue together the varying applications of a post-cloud world. If you're a developer, architect, designer or implementer that's living in this world, or just new to exploring it, Gluecon is the place for you.

To some people, it may seem odd that FourthSegment -- a company that is on the surface all about social media and e-commerce -- is spending time at a conference that deals with web infrastructure and APIs. But the issues we deal with under the covers at FourthSegment put the Gluecon topics right in our wheelhouse.

Social media is very much a part of the next generation of web infrastructure.  There is a world of technology hidden under the facade of tweets and Facebook posts that appear so easily in our streams and feeds. To be a real player in this new world, companies in the 'social media' space need to go beyond simply reading and writing statues from and to Facebook & Twitter.  They are going to need to take advantage of -- and innovate in -- the latest technology in fields like:

graph databases for understanding relationships

high volume real time event storage and processing

open APIs for allowing others to innovate on their technology

Now that the problems of large scale social network messaging have been virtually solved, our next challenge as technologists is to make social media more useful.  There are lots of people building on top of social media, but I think at its core the idea of making social media more useful can be distilled down to a simple idea: helping people find what they need, whatever it may be.

At times, this tenant can be at odds with itself.  For example, an advertiser getting what they want might mean finding out every webpage a consumer visits; while a consumer getting what they want might mean being able to browse the web without such privacy violations.  In both cases, however, the idea of sharing the right information at the right time to allow all parties to find what they need in an efficient manner is the key.

Finding a middle ground in this world is going to be the great challenge of the next five years on the internet.