February 03, 2009

ORD Camp a Huge Success

I was luck enough to be invited to attend ORD Camp this last weekend in blisteringly cold Chicago.  ORD Camp is an invite only, FooCamp style unconference targeted at geeks living in the Midwest. Having never attended a FooCamp style event I wasn't sure what to expect.  I can now say if you ever have the opportunity to attend an event like this it is well worth your time.

As you can see from the attendee list it was a very diverse group of people, not just the usual crowd of notable Open Source geeks.  The amount of brain power in that room was simply amazing and I can't remember when I had as much fun.  Some sessions were presentations, others were just focused discussions.  Everything from how words work, brewing beer, life hacking, to what not to do as a startup. 

While I loved the sessions the most fun was getting into random conversations ( some ended up being NSFW after midnight and many beers ) others were more typical.  Spent some time talking with people about PostgreSQL's advantages over MySQL, alternative business models, how a certain entrepreneur might improve the performance of their servers, etc.

It is difficult to determine how important this conference will be to my business in the future, but I can easily say that it has increased my drive, ambition, and overall excitement level.  Passionate people, doing amazing things will do that to you! I can't wait to attend next year.

January 24, 2008

EveryBlock.com is now launched

My friend and former co-worker Adrian Holovaty and his team just launched their new project EveryBlock.com. EveryBlock takes the term hyperlocal to a whole new level.  They aggregate tons of public data sources by geo location so you can for example find all of the recent crime around a particular address, neighborhood, zip code, etc.  Or maybe you might be interested in the building code violations of where you live or work?

Right now they have San Francisco, Chicago, and New York up and running, but will be adding more cities as time goes on.  Adrian asked me to help performance tune their PostgreSQL database a couple of months ago and so far things seem to be humming along nicely.

Here are some links to other blogs talking about EveryBlock.com:

Congrats and the best of luck to EveryBlock! I'm sure we'll see even more new and interesting things from this team in the future!