I honestly didn't think anyone was interested.

There's a metric eff ton to write, so it won't be up tonight.

Figured out a good solution to my video problem I talked about a little while ago. inkfilepicker + zencoder (they wrote a little blog post about it) makes uploading and encoding videos super easy. ~12 lines of JS, 20 lines of ruby. Easy to implement on my phonegap app. Super cool.

nice, good to know

I remember someone saying they don't even support firefox on mac... is that because it doesn't support a lot of basic video elements and whatnot? Seems like mp4 is off limits, which strikes me as moderately insane. Fortunately they work on the pc version.

Well, ansible is fun. In about 100 lines of yaml I was able to setup a fully working minimal CI playbook.

This lets me setup a server that I can push a git repo to and then all sorts of things happen like my app's test suite is ran, tarballs are made, things are deployed to production if everything works.

was it hard to learn? what host are you using it on?

It's running on a linux container at the moment but it could be ran on any host. It has no dependencies at all except for ansible which means just python 2.7.x and a few light python related packages.

I've been using it for a few months now. It's probably the easiest infrastructure management / orchastration tool around. I dropped chef and capistrano a while ago and never looked back.

Attended my first ios meetup. Most of the people there were working on their own apps and one guy who was working on the same BNR book as I was. Overall, it was a good experience listening to other people speak about ios concepts.

Next should be better since it will include an intro to swift presentation.

Anyone been to meetups? Bad/good experiences?

I attend a few here in Los Angeles. I'm a pretty shy person and by the time I get to one in the evening, I'm worn out from yammering my mouth all day at work.

In general, I prefer to go to ones with some sort of presentation. Hack nights are okay. Really depends on the language of the meetup, but never had a bad experience.

I also wish they'd serve something besides pizza. Just about every ice-breaker is "Why aren't you eating pizza?" where I have to lie and tell them I already ate Toxic Smell because I was starving.

Certain meetups are very good for learning about jobs available and I've been outright offered positions on a few occasions.

Haha yea, it's always pizza. It's cheap, quick and simple.

pizza is awesome, wtf is wrong with you!

What I find fascinating about the language meetups is how nearly no one there actually uses the language in question. Its interesting to hear the conversations about this or that. It may be a function of the presentations I like to go to, but I've ran into DevOps and Big Data people more than any other type of engineer. I guess that everyone has a fascinating job when they are not at work, but perhaps completely normal and humdrum in real life.

I'm severely allergic to tomatoes and pepperoni.

Is meetup.com the best way to find these hack-a-thon meetings?

The best thing about language-specific meetup groups is its a really great way to meet women.

that sucks

pesto pizza?

I always thought of Hacka-thons originated as an event where a group of people collectively work together to accomplish a goal within a short time frame. Nowadays on meetup.com there seems to be a lot of groups calling them "hackathon" despite it being just a tech social club mixed with a few presentations.

But I guess depends on where you are located, there is a variety of everything.

The ones in my area there is a good mix of language based meet ups and tech social clubs.

Well that's an awesome icebreaker but I bet it does get tiring having to explain it over again to different people.

You mean like "Chicks Can Code Python, Too! "

Yeah, that's good stuff, but I don't live in Italy either. Could you imagine calling up a meetup and being like "Dude, get pesto pizza from Dominoes."

I prefer not to explain that to anyone. It's not as simple as "Oh, that sucks." It often turns into other topical items and advice that is frankly insulting.

what kind of advice do people give you? are people really that dumb?

"Im have a severe allergy". "have you ever tried X?" "wow, ive lived my whole life with this and never thought of that!"

"You know, that is really unhealthy for your body. Have you tried just eating a little bit of it at a time so your body gets used to it? Then after a few years, you'll be able to eat as much as you want."

"That's because you eat too much red meat."

"I bet that you're really lactose intolerant [or insert whatever conspiracy food here] and it is tricking your body into thinking that this is poison."

"Do you take drugs or drink a lot?"

"Maybe you should go see a doctor. I bet they have something to cure that."

"Oh, so you don't like tomatoes... No shame in admitting that."

"Your parents never fed you fruits and vegetables?"

"I doubt that you actually are. It's probably from the pesticides."

"You should drink more water!"

"Have you tried taking Vitamin C?"

The rare person is somewhat interested in this stuff, but generally it is a bunch of other questions I don't feel like answering:

"Have you always been allergic to tomatoes? I hear people with childhood allergies grow out of it."

"I bet you wish you could eat some good Italian!" Sort of ignorant on what this tastes like, so...

"I'm sorry. Does it offend you when I eat this in front of you?" Would it offend you if I drank a bottle of Stricnine right now?

"What would happen if you ate a tomato right now?" Seriously?

"Oh, man! I love tomatoes!"

A very rare person will ask something more intelligent.

"I've heard of that before. I read something about trees... etc." But this is too rare and I'm not a barn animal. Thanks.

I had a brief period of time when I had a severely restricted diet and I can feel for Dave.

I use to get especially irritated with the: "Oh, my friend had something like this, but he stopped eating food Y (unrelated to current foods) and it fixed all his problems. You should stop eating Y!".

Like Dave mentioned, you can insert whatever you want for Y: meat, almonds, sugar, ...

Edit: Luckily my diet was so restricted and friends/acquaintances knew I liked to eat that I never got any of the "So you just don't like X" comments.

I bet it's because of Lisp

People in general are way too eager to talk about your health issues. I always try to avoid explaining that stuff.

The best antidote is never speak about it. I'm really good at hiding that, so in general, I look pretty normal...

The worst is when my coworkers decide to throw an impromptu pizza party. They all know about the tomato thing now, but I haven't had any comments.