Tech Groups in Kansas City
Kansas City is home to a surprising large number of technology groups. There is probably a social law that states individuals with similar interests will eventually concentrate. Through the four years I have lived in Kansas City, I have come to recognize three social categories: general user groups, institutional business organizations and large events. In this blog post, I will introduce the organizations and events I recommend to get a taste of the culture in Kansas City.
Joining a professional or trade organization is the simplest and easiest way to get involved. There is a user group for every programming language available as well as groups based on professional job title. I’m a frequent participant of the Kansas City Ruby Users group as well as a connector to several other organizations such as Social Media Club of Kansas City, the Cowtown Computer Congress, AIGA-the professional association for design and a few others. A list of groups I have visited and/or participated will be listed below.
Did you know Kansas City is home to one of the world’s leading organization for entrepreneurship, the Kauffman Foundation. There are also many other established resources for entrepreneurship such as the Entrepreneur of Johnson County, KC Source Link, The Chamber and KTEC. These groups are what I consider as institutional business organizations, they indirectly relate to technology. StartKC and OfficePort are entities that recently came into existence.
Larger events hold a special interest of mine, mainly because I am an organizer of a few events. In the past two years this category covers BarCamp, Highlight Midwest, Pre Dev Camp, Startup Weekend, Coders 4 Charity and a regional Ruby conference that my friends and I are organizing. This summer Kansas City will be hosting a Designer/Developer conference and a Kansas City Developer Day. I’m sure there are a few more events that I am unaware of.
Each social category attracts a different individuals. So don’t let one meeting or event spoil your desire to meet others and participate in the community.
Now here is a list of groups I’m connected to organized by memory:
- SMCKC – Social Media Club of Kansas City
- KCRUG – Kansas City Ruby Users Group
- KCJava – Kansas City Java Users Group
- DotNext – Meetup Group for Tech
- KCDOTNet – Kansas City .Net User Group
- Mobile Mondays – Mobile Discussion Group
- Adobe Design Core – Adobe Design Products User Group
- Adobe Film Core – Adobe File Products User Group
- Adobe Web Core – Adobe Web Product User Group
- Adobe Dev Core – Adobe RIA Product User Group
- AgileKC — User Group for Agile Software Methodology and Techniques.
- IFC – Independent Filmmaker’s Coalition of Kansas City
- AIGA – Association for Design
- Jelly – Group for Co-Working
- CCCKC – Cowtown Computer Congress of Kansas City [Hackerspace]
- MakeKC – User group of DIY and Builders
- KC/IABC – Kansas City International Association of Business Communicators
… and lets just stop there
I’m personally involved with a number of weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly events. I don’t have specific list of roles for involvement, but just know for now involvement opportunities are available. I’m going to save it for another blog post tomorrow.
Here is a list of events I had involvement with and events I’m currently involved in.
- Ruby Midwest
- Startup Weekend KC [note there talks for another event in 2010]
- Pecha Kucha Night
- Social Media Club of Kansas City regular events
- CCCKC
- Pre Dev Camp
- BarCamp
Lets leave it at that. Please comment if there is an organization you have questions about and I will try my best to answer it.
Social Media Club Awareness Chair Candidate
The month of May will mark the date that I have been in Kansas City for four years. The last three of those years, I have been actively raise awareness of creative tech professionals in the city of Kansas City through annual events. Since DotNext in 2007, I work with my fellow colleagues and friends to organize events such as Startup Weekend, BarCamp and StartupKC Drinks.
For all the events that I have thrown, I still feel there are many individuals outside of our social networks who would be interested in Social Media Club and all the other interest groups Kansas City has to offer. Events are one of the best ways to raise awareness, but the single most helpful thing We call can do is talk about to others.
If you have an event that you want to see happen, lets talk about it. I’m always reachable by email, Twitter and phone. I’m sure we can make it happen. Planning events and spreading the word is what I love to do.
For those who are not aware of what Kansas City has to offer, I encourage you to join in and voice your thoughts and desires. Kansas City is home to many groups, from hackers actively building hardware in the CCCKC caves, to entrepreneurs hashing their ideas during Startup Weekend, or artists speaking about their latest projects in 6 minutes at Pecha Kucha. If you have an interest, there is another person in Kansas City who is interested in the same.
If you are a member of the Social Media Club of Kansas City, please vote for me.
http://socialmediaclubkc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/voting-is-now-open-for-the
Thoughts on Mobile Payment
During the past few months, both Amazon and Paypal has announced mobile payment systems on their respective platforms. Listening to reports on mobile payment usage in India, Africa and Japan has me wondering if or when the United States will ever adopt the behavior.
Yesterday I read Caleb Elston’s post on mobile payments titled “Are Mobile Payments the Next Big Thing?“; it was very good read. The payment process he described was a process that I believe is simpler than I thought was possible. Before, my assumption was mobile payment would be possible through a mobile web app or a native mobile app.
There were other thoughts going through my head besides implementation, such as what are the use-cases mobile payments would be preferred over the traditional payment methods, e.g. cash and credit. Mobile Payment Adoption will be a challenge due to the habits and existing infrastructure for cash and credit. So lets just jump around to a few examples.
Digital Goods, Online Shopping
When buying digital goods or shopping online, mobile payments work well in this type of scenario mainly because the check-out process is asynchronous between the buyer and seller, which the seller is an automated machine. The maximum number of simultaneous check-outs is almost infinite for these shopping experiences, mainly limited by broadband and server resources. This example could be consider as a natural progression of commerce from a desktop device to a mobile device.
Simple Singular Transaction
This tangent is sprouted from how Japan and some privileged American Cities purchase their train tickets. Purchasing train tickets scenario is a simple process of fee that rarely change. Mobile Payment could be automated in that it is just a quick swipe of the mobile device or gateway that initiates the transaction. This example is rather simple and somewhat uninteresting. It is a substitution of the payment medium.
Physical Stores or Merchants
All of us are familiar with the process of making purchases in the physical space. Walking from aisle to aisle, acquiring physical goods, to check-out by standing in a queue to a limit number of cashiers. This example is synchronous, both the buyer and seller have to interact in real-time, both of which are human. This is the scenario in which I am interested to see how mobile payment has an affect. I find it to be my largest pain point and an experience that could be improved on. Changing the habit of purchasing physical goods is and will be a very difficult task.
So those are the first three use-cases that are floating in my head. I intend on promoting mobile payments, but I am just having trouble finding a good scenario that mobile payments can improve upon.
That is it for now.
jRuby Radiant CMS installation on Tomcat Server
For the past month, all the Radiant-jRuby installation instructions that I have found did not perform as advised. From what I have determined, the root of the issue was Radiant-jRuby was unable to create cache files. Thus disabling cache allowed Radiant to function properly with jRuby.
To disable caching, comment the config.middle.use argument in environment.rb file.
# config.middleware.use ::Radiant::Cache
If caching is incredibly important, the Rack::Cache module seems to function without any errors, however I haven’t figure out where the cache files are saved. To enable caching with Rack just update the config.middleware.use argument in environment.rb file.
config.middleware.use ::Rack::Cache
Here below are the instructions I used to enable Radiant on jRuby and Tomcat based on the Radiant CMS instructions at http://kenai.com/projects/jruby/pages/Radiant_CMS
Obtaining Gems
The command below is under the assumption all the required jdbc mysql adapters have been installed. If not please include activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter gem.
jruby -S gem install –no-ri –no-rdoc radiant radius rack-cache warbler
Create Project and Configuration
Lets create a Radiant mysql application in a directory.
jruby -S radiant –database=mysql radiantblog
Before the application data is created, the database.yml needs to be configured. Simply update the adapter to “jdbcmysql” instead of “mysql”. Here is what the production configuration would look like.
production:
adapter: jdbcmysql
database: radiant
username: username
password: password
host: localhost
With the database.yml configured, the database can now be bootstrapped.
jruby -S rake production db:bootstrap
Lets run the server to test the app and check it at localhost:3000
jruby -S script/server -e production
Deployment
The only deployment that I utilize is with Tomcat using the warbler gem. Here is the minimum configurations I used starting off with the command to generate the warbler configuration file
jruby -S warble config
warble.rb configuration:
Warbler::Config.new do |config|
config.dirs = %w(cache config db log public script vendor tmp)
config.gems += ["activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter", "radiant",
"jruby-openssl", "radius", "rack-cache"]
config.gem_dependencies = true
config.war_name = “ROOT”
end
The reason why the config.war_name is ROOT is to avoid any potential Radiant Routing issues. Next build the war file with the following command.
jruby -S warble war
After running the above command, move the newly created file, ROOT.war, to the Tomcat web directory. The URL, localhost:8080, should now render your newly created Radiant blog.
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