Misc Posts

It is the first ever Design Week Portland and I stopped by Fullscreen PM last night, a “casual creative show and tell meet up” and one of the multitude of nifty DWP events. There were a bunch of cool projects that artists, designers, and developers showed off, but I particularly liked Kaleidoscope, made by the folks at Instrument. It’s a beautiful javascript-based physics toy with which you can generate revolving clouds of customizable particles and then split it all apart into a lovely fracturing kaleidoscope. Hypnotic on large screens, engaging and interactive on handheld devices, Kaleidoscope is definitely worth exploring.

The folks over at "appfog":http://appfog.com/ have put together an extensive argument for why Portland could be the best city in the United States for developers.... and covered a lot of compelling things related to the local developer ecosystem.

Having said that... they missed everything around Portland that makes me stay in the area. All the hiking within "60 miles of Portland":http://www.amazon.com/60-Hikes-Within-Miles-Including/dp/0897329759 (there are even several trails within the city limits!), all of the rivers for kayaking, windsurfing, the snow resorts, all of the camping and backpacking that we can explore... etc.

Outside of getting immersed into your craft, it's nice to get out of the city to ponder those technical challenges while on a hike.

What a novel idea: Put a ton of effort and creativity into the task of advertising an open position, and I guarantee that the caliber of the applicants will be higher. And man that penguin is cute.

“We used to graduate two or three women CS majors per year, around 10%–12% of the total. Then one of our faculty members, Christine Alvarado, looked around and said, “Let’s do something about this.”

There’s an app for that