Tulsa Tech Fest
In addition to our work on MDN, this is a busy week for me in Tulsa - the annual Tulsa Tech Fest is Friday Oct 7th. Our Tulsa Web Devs group is doing an HTML5 track; my talk is the intro - HTML5: Code for all the platforms! (Soon to be a link to the slides)
TTF is a Microsoft-heavy event, but we've come a long way since TTF 2007 when Steven and I did the entire PHP track ourselves, covering Eclipse & PDT, PHPUnit & Selenium, CI w/ Phing & CruiseControl, DB refactoring w/ dbdeploy - sophisticated topics for 2007!
As far as the Tech Fest goes, I'm really looking forward to the community town hall the night before - developer group leaders from all around Tulsa get together to talk about how to grow the Tulsa developer community. I'm eager to see how the other groups are doing and to share experiences.
I'll spend all of Friday in the HTML5 room, unless I'm pulled off to the
Tulsa Hackathon
Tulsa Hackathon is a big event for me, as I've done a bunch of work for it.
It all started when Tulsa Web Devs took it upon ourselves to put Metro Tulsa Transit Authority data onto Google Maps. After a few hack days we made it work - barely. We still don't have all of MTTA's data, and we didn't make a shape file to smooth out the way Google draws the bus routes to match the roads, but we did pass the GTFS validation test! All that's left is to get MTTA to use our tool to publish the feed for Google - something that's proving harder than any of the code, I think.
In any case, most of us enjoyed working on a cool project that improved Tulsa. So, I reached out to other organizations to see what other projects we might try. Over the last couple months, we've set up projects for INCOG (another transit org in the area), Tulsa City County Library, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, and Fab Lab Tulsa. We're an official Random Hacks of Kindness community event!
Scott Phillips and I have arranged all the facilities and venues, logistics, swag, meals, etc. I'm anxious to see how much we actually get done. But really, there are just two goals - improve Tulsa, and our developer community.
Thank you Stormy (and Mozilla) for helping to sponsor our Hackathon! Everyone in Tulsa loves having Mozilla involved! I love that Mozilla promotes the web for public benefit - from hundreds of millions of Firefox users to a few dozen hackers in Tulsa Oklahoma.
