OpenSourcery

The SAO's Quality Assurance Special Interest Group's (QASIG) panel discussion, aptly titled "Life Inside an Iteration," is now available for download from the SAO's social network. (Cramming five acronyms into a single sentence is decidedly clunky. Sorry.)

OpenSourcery's Brian Jamison moderated the panel, which included some of Portland's best Agile thinkers and implementers. Chris Jones from Yesmail, Wayne Allen of Integrated Services, Sumant Vashisth from McAfee, and Todd Whitaker describe their Agile best practices in this informative, example-rich discussion.

Download the audio files here.

So sit back, download the discussion, plug your iPod into the stereo, throw together a nice meal, and be transported to Agile bliss with "Life Inside an Iteration."

January's Drupal Meetup promises to be so interesting and useful it hardly needs introduction. So I'll try to keep it short.

First, please remember that OpenSourcery's office has moved to 1636 NW Lovejoy, between 16th and 17th Streets. Drupal Meetups are free and open to the public: everyone from Drupal power users to newbies is invited. And while we generally focus on one topic, every Meetup has its fair share of question-and-answer and free-flowing discussion.

January's Topic and Presenter

We're fortunate to welcome Todd Tomlinson, a managing partner with Aha Consulting, to speak with us about Panels. Todd will go through the process of creating a project management workbench using Drupal 6, Panels 2.0 and Views. He will demonstrate the concepts in a workshop format - with lots of hands on activities. If you have a laptop please bring it to the meeting.

As Todd states in his introduction: "Panels 2.0 is a powerful and feature-rich toolset that every Drupal developer should have in their tool belt. Panels provides the ability to significantly enhance your ability to render content on your site through a simple point/click/drag and drop interface."

Todd has 30+ years in the IT industry and also serves as the Senior Professor and Area Chair for the School of Information Technology at the University of Phoenix - where he teaches web design and development. Todd has been involved in developing web CMS solutions since the mid-90's - focusing his efforts on Drupal for the past 3 years.

Please mark your calendar and be sure to join us Wednesday, January 14 from 6pm until 8pm. For more information contact thomas@opensourcery.com and visit the Portland Drupal Users Group page here.

We look forward to seeing you there.

It seems Agile development, OpenSourcery's chosen software development method, is finally reaching the broad acceptance it deserves. We have a lot to say about Agile (ask us more), so it makes perfect sense that OpenSourcery co-founder and CEO Brian Jamison would moderate the upcoming "Life Inside an Iteration" panel.

The Software Association of Oregon (SAO) will host the event, with the guidance of its Development Special Interest Group (DevSIG) and Quality Assurance SIG (QASIG).

Join us and learn what "Life Inside an Iteration" is really like. Panelists will discuss what activities help QA and Development work in sync, what the hand offs are and how they happen, and how they have managed the inevitable change within the iteration. Panelists include developers, testers, customers and consultants to bring a broad perspective of best practices to these issues.

Learn more about the event here. We hope to see you there.

Join us November 5th at 6 PM for Chris Anderson's introduction to the CouchDB framework. Chris is a Portland-based entrepreneur at Grabb.it and the co-author of an upcoming O'Reilly book on CouchDB.

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, but can be easily accessed from any environment that provides means to make HTTP requests. There are a multitude of third-party client libraries that make this even easier for a variety of programming languages and environments.

This event is free to the public. In order to accommodate the appropriate number of attendees, please rsvp to: thomas@opensourcery.com.

The event takes place at OpenSourcery: 711 SE Ankeny (on Ankeny and SE 7th, one block south of Burnside). We encourage biking and public transportation.

Tonight in Portland, friends of Josh Tickell's Fuel documentary will walk, bike, run, skip, navigate automobiles fueled by biodiesel, and sidle their way to the film's Sneak Preview downtown. It promises to be an exciting event that brings together attendees from many disciplines: software executives, local activists, biodiesel evangelists. You get the idea.

Fuel, which won the Sundance audience award for a Documentary (under the title Fields of Fuel), has been released with wider distribution this fall. The documentary will play in Portland on November 14th, followed by showings in Seattle, Austin, and Bend, OR. Their revamped site has some great interactive tools, including a form for demanding Fuel to be shown in your city, a media section bursting with video, audio and photographs, and various ways to get involved.

You can learn more about the film's premise on the website as well, including activities average film-goers can partake in to help reduce individual and nationwide dependence on fossil fuels.

Tonight's event is completely booked, but mark your calendars for November 14th and check the website for further details.

Thank you for reading.

The monthly DrupalPDX Meetup returns to its regular time and place this month. It looks like we're going to have an excellent presentation followed by open discussion and, as a matter of course, a cold beer at the Green Dragon afterward.

From the official announcement: "Brian Gilday of Aha Consulting will be doing a presentation on building with minimal coding." Find the full description HERE; in short, it's a topic for power users on how to make the most of existing modules using configuration and a minor coding.

The meetup takes place October 8th from 6pm-8pm at our offices, located at 711 SE Ankeny (one block south of E Burnside at 7th). As always, the event is free and open to all Drupal enthusiasts.

Mark your calendar, bring a discussion topic, register at the DrupalPDX page, and we'll see you there.

As part of its ongoing Meetup series, the OTBC in Beaverton will present "Open Source Software: Benefits and Challenges," a panel featuring three distinct perspectives on open source software: legal, business and development. This from the official announcement on the Meetup page: "The panel will consist of speakers experienced with intellectual property issues in adopting open source software, participating in open source and open standard communities, and using a range of licensing models."

Brian Jamison, founder and CEO of OpenSourcery, joins panel moderator Martin Medeiros (partner, Swider Medeiros Haver, LLP) and Jim Wasko (Program Director for Cloud Computing, IBM Systems and Technology Group, IBM) to discuss strategic approaches to leveraging open source vs. proprietary software. We're pretty certain where Brian will fall along that continuum.

The Meetup takes place at the offices of OTBC in Beaverton. Find directions here. We look forward to seeing you there.