There was a packed house, as usual, for the January meetup of the Web Dev group, held at the AlphaLoft coworking space. After the usual announcements by organizer and AlphaLoft proprietor Josh Cyr, there were three lightning presentations:
- Open Source Software: an excellent overview of the concerns developers should have about Open Source Software and the processes they should be doing. Introduced by Matt Jacobs of Acentage Law, PLLC, the main presentation was by Matthew Jacobs, General Counsel of Black Duck Software, Inc. Mr. Jacobs included a copy of his white paper, “The Talk: What a General Counsel Needs To Know About Open Source Software” also available on the Black Duck Software web site.
- Blogging with the Ghost blogging platform. Sean Baker blogs at http://www.seanvbaker.com web site using Ghost software. Sean was very intrigued with the new business model adopted by Ghost founder John O’Nolan and the non-profit business model he set up for Ghost. Ghost appears to be a minimal product (in the good, lean sense) focused on blogging alone, and avoiding the complexities of morphing into a Content-Management-System-To-Rule-Them-All.
- Elastic Search, presented by Nick Plante. Elastic Search is technology based on Lucene. Nick moved from Solr to Elastic. [Side note: the right time to use MongoDB: never.] Elastic Search is used by some of the big guns: Etsy, GitHub, Path, Foursquare, since 2010. It’s all JSON, all the time, so you avoid the bottlenecks of interfaces and impedance mismatches of query languages, object models, etc. It supports excellent horizontal scaling: hand it hosts, and it creates shards across them. It has excellent tokenizers built-in, since it is based on Lucene. Nick suggests avoiding NIH syndrome by searching for tokenizers before taking the DIY route: it’s probably already out there: tokenizers are available for strings, numerics, arrays, stemming, synonyms and more.
Thanks to Josh for organizing and all the speakers for putting together coherent and informative presentations.