Frameworks, link share and entrepreneurial investments

So since I have been living here in Cancun I have been involved with this developers meetup where we talk and share impressions and comments around development topics. Things like frameworks, languages, best practices and also just have fun with new applications and discoveries. All these took part on last meetup we had yesterday.

The atendee list was small even if many more verified their assistance. A total of four developers gather, most of them I already knew from previous sessions however a new face showed up to this meetup. Some great applications where shared during our meetup including an application similar to the Illumination software creator, which generate applications for Linux, Windows, OSX, Iphone, Andorid and so on, but a new one called Titanium. The whole toolkit is based on Javascript and then generated into the native language. Quite similar to the Illumination software except is a pygtk generation and flex.

Other topics were circulating including the troubleshooting of a JQuery module for the use inside a site. While some hacking was going on an interesting discussion which I decided to record about the differences between the frameworks and MVC model versus the traditional way of developing web applications.

The discussion was pretty interesting and the comments about Python vs PHP and how MVC can be applied to certain applications. There was also some link sharing including Woopra, an alternative to Google Analytics. Rescuetime.com which acts as a monitor of your time spent in at the workstation and teach you how to save time between the applications you are working at.

There was a small discussion about hosting services and cloud services versus VPS and smaller shared accounts, on price point and also cloud services. From local backup to Carbonite and similar cloud services which I am not very found off. My philosophy on using linux for example has changed the way I percieved hardware and when making a selection on netbooks or laptops I just see a shell to my information that lives on different devices as opposed on planning and saving for just 1 expensive piece of tech.

The last part of the meetup was quite interesting, we change scenery and went to a Wings Army which was a good time to throw some food. We were able to talk about the business side of entrepreneurship. We went from venture capitals in Mexico to a directory of south california investments. He told me his experience with government funding and how corruption brought the whole thing down. Something unfortunately very common in the government.

Eventually going back to stories about how to look for greener pastures and try to refocus the strategy and how to avoid huge ammount of paperwork to get by the funding of the solution. I shared my personal strong critics to the Mexican ‘investors’ being completely missplaced as far as what market capitalization vs monetization and growth. As many would notice, Google, twitter, and even Facebook, monetization was always pushed further and delayed as much as possible, even now at 50+ billion dollars there still not substantial monetization yet investment is now pouring from every angle.

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Codejam and Development Thursday

So today was a great day, well rather yesterday I guess. I spent a couple of hours late night with a bunch of other developers on a conf call and coding at the same time. This was a great experience coming from the somewhat disbelief of the events that are being undertaken by some of my peers. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the event is a good idea, but having too many events might become a distraction of the real goal. So I started a code jam just to see the difference.

So CodeJam’s big difference is what do you know that you want to share, and what we can do together as a collective. I think that smart people know how to work together, while not so smart people are satisfied by just talking about their individual achievements. So to avoid ending up with a group on the lather I try to come up with a more active group that could provide some insight into the coding development and learn it through the practical documentation.

Since I have a global call conference center at my disposal I tried to use it and start doing development with these couple of guys. The goal was to create at least the basic examples of the framework we were targeting.

The framework we saw was Raphael and Pyjamas. The first one was a Javascript framework for the manipulation of SVG. The second one was a python framework to generate multiple effects through HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Originally it was about Javascript but I think the current form goes beyond it and into new development of things.

We had lots of fun trying to solve the first examples and end up with a great satisfaction about being able to at least start understanding the framework. Unfortunately starting so late make us finish early as well. Not to mention that we just got to install it and configure it. I hope some of the guys stick to it and come up with something good on their own.

During the chit chat we came also with some questioning about the use of IDE, and how vim is very powerful but we need better information on how to use it. Something that I somewhat solved by finding a presentation on the use of VIM and PHP.

The next day was the Development meetup and well it wasn’t as good as I expected but eventually we got stuff out there. At least we shared some good links of projects regarding AppEngine, Javascript’s Frameworks for games and other interesting development of Google Maps. I also showed what we did the night before at the codejam meetup and well we got to talk about how to better organize ourselves. The meeting end up on a great note as we were talking about trying to pull out geeks from the university one of the baristos from the starbucks came and talk to us asking about being a student of one of the colleges I went at the beginning of the week and asking if we could contact them. Which was exactly what I did this monday. I hope that he email me so we can come down to something interesting.