The Grace Hopper Celebration is a yearly event to highlight the contributions of women to computing. In lieu of jumping on a plane to Houston this year, I instead attended the first Grace Hopper Connect @ Google event in NYC.

This month, I attended and presented at the first Wagtail Space conference/sprint in the USA. Wagtail Space USA, led by the parent company Torchbox, took place on June 14th–16th at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This post is summary of the event.

In late February, Emerging Technology Consortium at Columbia hosted an interactive workshop featuring Google AR and VR technologies. Google showcased a few of their products that could potentially be implemented in teaching and learning.

Go, a systems programming language developed and open sourced by Google, has emerged as a very important language for interesting infrastructure projects such as Docker and Prometheus. It's worth keeping a close eye on the Go community to stay updated on those kinds of projects. This post outlines how, where, and why we use Go at CTL.

These are notes from a talk by Stephen Kimball about a promising new open source database. While ambitious in its priorities, it seems like CockroachDB developers have chosen a solid set of design goals and have a workable strategy for achieving them.

Back in June, I attended the one-day Open Analytics Summit. We aren't really doing much with analytics or big data here at CCNMTL (yet), but there are many conversations and projects happening around campus and I wanted to get a better sense of the kinds of value these methods are yielding.

Back in May, Anders attended the Ricon East, "a distributed systems conference by and for engineers, developers, scientists and architects". The distributed data-store Riak was featured prominently at the conference but the event was intended more as a conference on distributed systems in general spanning academia and industry.

DjangoCon '12 is on the East Coast this year, and we submitted a proposal to present on our recent intervention in South Africa. We hope to see you in DC!

I just came back from the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) workshop, working to develop a standard format for annotations on images, video, text and other resources.The group's current work is on the right track--there are two parts to any annotation: the 'constraint' which is the part of a resource we're focusing on, and the 'body' which is the metadata describing details of that constrained section of the resource.

Last night Sky and I presented MediaThread at a Django meetup in NYC. We were invited to give a full presentation after a lighting talk back a few months ago. The event was held at Huge with about 20 people attending from a variety of backgrounds. The participants were engaged and involved, asking questions about our implementation, process, and student usage. We also heard a report back on the European DjangoCon and broke bread (and beer) with local Djangonaughts.