Video on getting a Plone Development Box up and running with Nitrous.io

This week at the March Jamaica Plone Meetup will be focused on learning about using the Robot Framework. This is a video designed to get participants up to speed before the event.

I've also prepared some slides and a github gist

The Gist

After Digital Jam 3 - Take aways and next steps

Just a few photos from the recent "unofficial" After Digital Jam 3 meetup. This is not meant to be a faithful or exhaustive transcription of the meetup. Funny how this post echoes the idea from 2012 post that discusses how to figure out how we create "Digital Craftsmen".

The "unofficial" After Digital Jam 3 Meetup was small but worthwhile. We were able to put the events of Digital Jam 3 Day 1 into some perspective and discuss how members of the Jamaican developer community could act upon some of the initiatives that were indicated by the various speakers.

Introductions

We actually spent a lot of time in just introductions around the table. Present at the meetup were:

Rohan Smith a developer who has recently moved to Trindidad and Tobago pitched his new project Rastival, a "hear it later" app (my words), Rastival is a mobile app and chrome extension which will allow users to hear rather than read articles of their choice from around the web. 

Damien Harris - Managing Director at Unique Media Designs, his company is known for for Virtual Mall Jamaica and their online marketing services. They also also develop eCommerce websites for businesses in Jamaica including a payment gateway that works via National Commercial Bank.

Kaiton Williams - Technology Anthropologist, he's interested in understanding how Jamaicans are interacting with technology, previous to this he spent a decade working at Microsoft and has also worked with companies her in Jamaica including Pan Media and Jamaica Online, when it was around. 

Ramon McLaren - Software developer who has worked in media. He's now at the University of the West Indies as the coordinator for final projects in the Computer based management information systems programme (CBMIS) at the Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM). While he declares himself to be an "AntiSocial", he doesn't do Facebook or Twitter, he certainly can keep up a conversation.

Allistaire Mclaren - An engineer at CARIMAC and is wrapping up the CBMIS programme, he's working with a team to convert their final project into a software product. 

Daryl Baugh - An entrepreneur who works with web metrics, web design and building internet companies. There is lots more to say about Daryl like his ability to draw on obscure statistics to match every point he makes but we'll stop here for now.

General Discussion

From the days' proceedings I personally singled out a comment by Chris Zacca who pointed out that investors are looking for alternatives to government paper and may be more willing than previously to invest in tech businesses. I think we're all waiting to see what happens with "Startup Jamaica" the incubator that Julian Robinson says will become a reality in the near future.

We spent time listening to Rohan's pitch for his new app http://rastival.com which will help you to "hear the internet".

Take Aways

It would be impossible to curtail the discussion to things related to Digital Jam 3, some take aways from the meetup:

• Persons liked the idea of meetups where we actually get to build stuff (less talk more action), the actual implementation details will need to be decided upon. 
• There is a need for a more accessible community of coders/mentors. While there are systems, even informal that mentor musicians and athletes but no equivalent at any significant scale exists for up and coming developers. Rohan shared how in his early days he wanted to code but had no idea where to go to or who to speak to.
• Mobile money could be a good thing but there was a fear of silos, we think that the best possible outcome would be interoperability standards so that you don't get locked into XYZ's mobile cash that can't be exchanged with ABC's own.

Most people at this meetup weren't as impressed with the Crowdflower, crowd working thing. Perhaps we weren't the right audience. The Crowdflower type model does make room for those who may not be higher level information workers to begin to tap into an internet based revenue but it's likely to be dull and repetitive tasks.

Where do we go from here?

Echoing a question that was raised at the Digital Jam 3.0 event, we started to discuss where we might want to take things. In terms of value to the developer community there seem to be two things to deal with:

1. A way for newbies to connect with mentors

2. A community where developers can grow their skills and learn best practices

Kaiton suggested that we look at a simple model where developers meet to code on and learn about interesting problems, similar to Kitchen Table Coders.  I think spaces like what "Startup Jamaica" will hopefully be will help towards this. In the meantime, I'm off to scheme to see how I can begin to contribute to some of this.

Jamaica Plone Meetup July 2013 - Part 1 of 2

Some of the participants in the meetup
(Jason is behind the cell phone camera)

This is the first time in a while that the Plone community in Jamaica has come together for any form of event.  Thanks to +Jason Murphy for the pictures. 

The People at the Meetup

Jason "JSON" Murphy in the front and
Tarik Carey in the background.

“I got tired of PHP” 

Jason Murphy is my person to watch in the Plone community, Jason “JSON” Murphy is Co-founder of a startup called Artuvic. “the Plone work we do is based on my interest, mostly because I got tired of PHP and wanted to find a language that I wanted to work with... the only one that stuck was Python” says Jason. He became interested in it after hearing how a Python script was used to get through a firewall in the movie “the Social Network”. “My love for Python set me looking for an alternative CMS and that led me to Plone.” 18 months later he is now a contributor to the Plone project having released a Bootstrap based carousel extension for Plone True Gallery. He considers this a modest contribution, expect to see more stuff in the future.

Tarik Carey has mostly done work with PHP based platforms, he's strongest with Joomla and Wordpress and has been around the web for awhile. Based on his interest, it looks like his first stop on the Plone road is going to be Diazo theming. We introduced him to Plone Theming Step by Step and he introduced us to Nitrous.io.

Anthony Coore (centre) and Ricardo Stewart

Anthony Coore has done web work with ASP and JSP type platforms in the past as well as some simple sites using Wordpress. He is currently working on a “top secret project”* and has selected Plone as his platform. After exploring a few options, including Wordpress, the scale and feature set needed for the project led him to narrow it down to Drupal vs Plone, in the end he decided on Plone. His research led him to believe that it would be easy to set up, so "I decided to invest my time in”. He's definitely on the learning curve but he's armed himself with the Plone 4 Development book so he's moving in the right direction. He already knows how to create his own components using Dexterity, next he's working on learning how to customize the editing and viewing experience.

* Regarding Anthony's top secret project, he says that he may be willing to recruit people who are willing to work for free, there would be some partnership opportunities.

“Through the years I’ve found Plone very simple to implement and it is easy to train users (once you know MS Word you can use the interface)”

Valdeck Rowe (centre) flanked by Ricardo and Wendy

Wendy Dressekie-Gordon “We’ve been utilizing Plone at UTECH for internal websites and are in the process of … getting ready to deploy the main site using Plone”. They run everything in a Windows environment, not the most commonly selected platform for Plone deployments. The Plone community isn't as helpful to Windows users. “Through the years I’ve found Plone very simple to implement and it is easy to train users (once you know MS Word you can use the interface)” she said. She's definitely an integrator, so her focus tends to be implementing custom workflows, which can be tricky. Overall she summarizes it as follows “It’s been good.... ”

Ricardo Stewart was introduced to the word “Plone” by Valdeck Rowe at 5 pm (the meeting started at 5:30 pm). He has experience with Python and has done a little Java and C. So he didn't have too many preconceived ideas, as he puts it he was “here to learn and ...see where it goes”.

“I'm looking to see how I can reduce my work by utilizing the features that are already there”

Valdeck Rowe got into web development as part of the CIT programme, started with JSP and Java and switched to PHP when he realized how much he could get done with less code. He has done a few websites and even built a CMS in PHP. In his own words, “Having built a CMS, it opens up understanding to the things needed for running a site”, he found himself adding features to his CMS as he found use for them. “Then I discovered Plone which already had the features I had built and done [them] better”, he has started to look at Plone as an option and is considering it for future projects.

Valdeck says that he “Co-founded a company that did software engineering and websites etc... ”, now he is looking into developing web marketing services. To this end he is considering a move to Python for some of his existing projects which are currently implemented in PHP such as his mobile marketing platform (http://futurestepsintl.com). He's also explored a couple other ideas including a food ordering and delivery service MunchiLunchi.com. Regarding Plone his goal is simple “I'm looking to see how I can reduce my work by utilizing the features that are already there”.

These guys want you to pay with Blaze (Jamaica's New Payment Platform)

I visited JGXLabs today, Jamaica's most recent technology incubator where I met with the founders of blaze-pay.com,  +Jason Scott, +Kevin Leyow  (the other founder +Jonathan Cooper wasn't present at that time (I later discovered that was coding from home that morning).

So far with a team of three, they've managed to get to a shipable product over a period of two months.

Look for Blaze as a mobile payment option all over the place this summer.

I think this thing is going to blow up! 

Here's my short interview with Jason.

Jason and Kevin about to demo the Blaze Pay App

Where did the idea and the name come from?
Codesprint (yeah, that's the one word answer, what he means is that the first version of the product was built in 24 hours at a coding sprint earlier this year)
Needed a name for the competition, so Kevin was like "Blaze!".

What does Blaze do?
Blaze makes your day to day transactions easier by using mobile technologies to facilitate payments.

Who do you want to use this?
Our first target audience would be restaurants, bars and clubs.

While there I signed up for an account and they promise me that it works. Kevin even sent me $1 Jamaican.

What technologies are you using?
It's written in Python and we currently use Twitter Bootstrap as our CSS framework.