Keith's Blog » San Francisco

Never Have I Felt More Famous

Keith — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:05:32 +0000

Ah, the day my tent showed up in TechCrunch:

San Francisco Bay Area FP Group

Keith — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 19:40:34 +0000

I’d like to announce the formation of the Bay Area Functional
Programmers group. This group is for anyone using or interested in
functional programming and functional programming languages,
particularly strongly typed languages such as Haskell, OCaml, SML,
etc.

The first meeting will be Thursday, September 13th at 7:30pm somewhere
in San Francisco. Please join the mailing list at
http://groups.google.com/group/bayfp and suggest a location. The
initial meeting will be a casual pizza and beer get together, although
going forward we’d like to also include speakers, reading and
discussion of technical papers, and some hands on coding. Future
announcements and the location of the first meeting will be posted to
the BayFP mailing list.

More information will be available on the website: http://bayfp.org/.

Keith (+ Mike Wells, of Skydeck, who deserves most of the credit for initiating this)

North Bay Ruby Users Group: First Meeting This Thursday

Keith — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:01:44 +0000

I’m pleased to re-announce a new Ruby Users Group for folks north of San Francisco (or who like to go to Sebastopol, CA): the North Bay Ruby Users Group.

Our first meeting is this week; February 15th, 2007 at 7:00pm. O’Reilly has graciously offered us a place to meet, so we’ll be holding the meetings at O’Reilly HQ in Sebastopol, CA (directions).

Meetings are on the third Thursday of each month. If you’re interested in learning more, please sign up for the mailing list.

Our first meeting will feature Rob Orsini and myself, kicking things off by discussing how O’Reilly uses Ruby to make good things happen.

Please RSVP on the mailing list so we know how much pizza to buy. We hope to seeing you there!

North Bay Ruby Users Group Formed

Keith — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:15:48 +0000

I’m pleased to announce a new Ruby Users Group for folks north of San Francisco (or who like to go to Sebastopol, CA): the North Bay Ruby Users Group with a first meeting on February 15th, 2007 at ~~7:30pm~~ 7:00pm. O’Reilly has graciously offered us their meeting space, so we’ll be holding the meetings at the office in Sebastopol, CA (directions). The initial schedule for meetings is the third Thursday of each month, but we can have a discussion about whether other times work better at the first meeting. If you’re interested in learning more, please sign up for the mailing list.

[Full disclosure: Both Rob Orsini (the author of the recently released Rails Cookbook) and I are both employees of O'Reilly Media, so I can't pretend that holding the meetings here was a total accident.]

The agenda, as well as everything else, for the first meeting is still in flux, but Rob and I are planning to do a presentation on how O’Reilly uses Ruby internally, from small internal Rails sites to Atom Publishing Protocol libraries to XML processing. We can spend the rest of the time getting to know each other, eating pizza, and planning upcoming meetings. If you’d like to make a presentation at a future meeting or know someone who should, please join the mailing list and make suggestions (even if you can’t make it every month).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

PS: Yeah, the website is pretty crappy right now, we’ll be making it more useful in the coming days, adding a wiki and all that. For now, just be happy it isn’t this.

Remembering a Slower Internet

Keith — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:34:04 +0000

I’ve been blessed with an opportunity to investigate first-hand what the internet feels like for the voiceless masses with slow internet connections. My findings will shock you! For me, the opportunity comes despite my living in the geographic center of a very densely populated urban area–specifically from my living over 15000 feet from where the cable that will become my worthless Earthlink (don’t buy!) DSL originates. Let me tell all of you sitting on the edge of your seats with anticipation: the internet sucks for people with less than a 1KB/s connection. Think I’m exaggerating? Think again:

Colin in Town

Keith — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 13:48:58 +0000

One of the hardest parts about leaving Boston, well, essentially the only hard part, was leaving Altay and Colin. When I got out to San Francisco, I emailed Colin almost immediately to tell him how nice it was and to ask him to come out. True to his best, I’d receieved an email saying “How’s the weekend of the 23rd” within hours.

It’s nice to have someone that listens…

It’s also nice to have someone that wears silly hats:

Not sure what we’ll do this weekend, but I think it’ll include a little time in wine country (the first time for both of us).