Posts

JazzHub is a new project from IBM that provides the power of Rational Team Concert (RTC) in a cloud environment. If you’re working on a public project it’s entirely free. In fact, it’s also free until at least the end of 2013 for private projects too. The obvious question that most people are going to ask is “Why should I use JazzHub if I know how to use GitHub?” This is a perfectly fine question and I don’t fault anyone for asking it.
Last night I, along with a lot of other amazing folks, gave a lightning talk at the Data Science DC meetup. In addition to talks about being a “growth hacker”, random forests, consensus clustering, and “If you give a nerd a number”, there was my humble talk about GitHub, Graph Databases, and gaining insight about the social aspects of your project. In short, I did an exploration of the Julia programming language using my tool, GitMiner, to evaluate the social aspects of the community around the language.
For the last year and a half I’ve been working with Anita Sarma, a professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and her graduate student, Corey Jergensen, to try and understand some of the social dynamics around GitHub. As we began to dig at the ecosystem we realized that we had an opportunity to perform some novel analysis on the community. Specifically, GitHub is a highly networked ecosystem and most of the queries that we were doing were localized around single projects or developers.

Wed, Mar 6, 2013

On May 1st, 2012 I embarked on an experiment at work — I started signing work emails to my team and friends inside and outside the office with the words “KTHXBYE” or “KTHXBAI”. The goal was to see how long it would take until someone mentioned or asked about it. About two weeks after I started the experiment a friend from Microsoft noticed it and mentioned it to me. Of course, I replied with a meme:
Once again I’m looking for an amazingly bright Ph.D. student to work with me over the course of the summer. The position is open to Ph.D. students from any university and at any point of their studies, and I can nearly guarantee it’s going to be an awesome experience. The primary task will be applying machine learning techniques (lexical analysis, network extraction, predictive analytics) to the usage data from a large piece of commercial software.
Tech jobs are hot in New York right now. Last year while sitting in LaGuardia Airport waiting for a flight I was hacking on some code for work in Eclipse and guy who was shoulder surfing me tried to persuade me to interview for positions he had available at his hedge fund. If you visit any Meetup in the city you’ll hear from dozens of people who are looking for the best and the brightest.
A couple of years ago I got the bright idea that I’d get my wife open water SCUBA certification as her Christmas present. She likes aquariums and fish and I thought it would be a fun way to do something different when we travel. Fast forward to the present day and I’ve got a closet filled with neoprene, BCDs, fins, first aid kits, and a dive log filled with all sorts of certification cards from PADI.
Recently I’ve seen a number of friends and acquantences post some variation of the following message to their Facebook walls: In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berne Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all time.
Development of any moderately complex software package is a social process. Even if a project is developed entirely by a single person, there is still a social component that consists of all of the people who use the software, file bugs, and provide recommendations for enhancements. This social aspect is one of the driving forces behind the proliferation of social software development sites such as GitHub, SourceForge, Google Code, and BitBucket.

Fri, May 11, 2012

This is my first new post written in markdown for the static version of patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog. The only reason I was running both PHP and MySQL on my server was to host wordpress which became a pain in the ass with all of the upgrades. This eliminates all of those nasty security holes and allows me to focus a little bit more on just writing. Which is what a weblog is supposed to be.