When? Wednesday, 22.05.2013

Where?
Adcloud GmbH
Venloer Straße 25-27
50672 Köln

E-Mail: waldemar.schwan@adcloud.com, tjg@pentaside.org

Doors open 16:30
Workshop 17:00 - 19:00

Free drinks and BBQ afterwards.

What you will learn

This will be a very pragmatic — hands on — workshop. We will start with a short introduction (~30 minutes) to syntax and basic usage patterns, giving you the chance to ask questions.

After that, we will encourage people to pair up and start working on our example project.

In the last 30 minutes, you will be encouraged to present your solution.

We will finish with a BBQ, where you can talk with other attendees or continue on your project.

Although the event is free we ask you to register since space is limitted:

TechTalk #5 - Asgard and the AWS cloud

We are happy to announce our first Adcloud TechTalk in 2013:

Asgard and the AWS cloud

Manually managing infrastructure with a lot of components and servers is very error-prone. Especially in dynamic environments like in the “cloud” it often leads to maintenance problems that require lots of time. A solution could be the introduction of change management applications like puppet, chef, etc. but this of course needs sophisticated knowledge and experience and also adds another level of complexity to the exisiting infrastructure. NetFlix, one of the biggest players in the big-data business, hosts its complete infrastructure in the AWS cloud and needs to maintain it automatically. Therefore they developed a tool called ‘Asgard’ which provides the lacking interface to already existing functionality of the AWS cloud thus enabling user-friendly management of cloud infrastructure

In this talk, Johannes Hörle and Roland Gude from Yoochoose will give a short overview of Asgard’s functionality and how they use it to administer their cloud environment.

“Don’t ask what you can do for the cloud, ask what the cloud can do for you!”

Johannes holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. He now works as Lead Engineer at Yoochoose and coordinates the development of the SaaS Recommender System in the AWS Cloud. In his free time he likes playing football and riding his road bike.

Roland holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Applied Science Bonn-Rhein Sieg. After working as a research fellow at the German Aerospace Center Institute for Simulation and Software technology he joined Yoochoose as an Engineer, where he is mainly concerned with scalability of the Yoochoose software stack. In the meantime he takes care for his 2 year old daughter. Apart from that he enjoys playing football, reading and going to the theater.

The event will be held on Wednesday, February 27th in our office: Venloer Str. 25-27, Cologne. Doors open at 17:30. Talk starts 18:00. Event ends around 19:30.

Although the event is free we ask you to register since space is limitted:

Winter is coming and so is our last Tech Talk of the year. This time it is all about music and processing real time events.

The Sound of Adcloud

We have created an automated Adcloud music generator. The events (eg clicks, conversions, retargeting) of our adservers are used to create sound in real-time. Timo is going to introduce the different components and literally going to rock the house. Here is an apetitzer.

The event will be on Wednesday, 12th of December in our office: Venloer Str. 25-27, Cologne. Doors open at 17:00. Talk starts 17:30. Event ends around 19:00.

Although the event is free we ask you to register since space is limitted:

The summer is over. Our little break too. Lets continoue with our Adcloud Techtalks. This time with some with a slighlty deeper topic:

As you might have seen in NoSQL: Not Only a Fairy Tale Redis is one our most important NoSQL databases. We use it extensively throughout our different systems. Time to look behind the curtain:

Redis Internals

This time Tim Becker will show us how to pay more attention to the man behind the curtain! Redis is not magic, in this talk we’ll rummage through source code, start reading C, examine the redis protocol, event loop and some datastructures. It should provide enough information that you won’t fear diving in the code yourself and have a good overview of what’s going on behind the curtain.

The event will be on Wednesday, 24th October in our office: Venloer Str. 25-27, Cologne. Doors open at 17:00. Talk starts 17:30. Event ends around 20:00.

Although the event is free we ask you to register since space is limitted:

This is a cross-post from Sebastian Cohnens personal blog.

At this year’s NoSQL Matters conference in Cologne, which was also the first one of its kind, I held a talk together with Timo Derstappen about the evolution of adcloud’s adserver. We took the audience on a journey spanning multiple years of changing requirements and the resulting architectural decisions made during that time. A focus was on NoSQL databases involved in the adserver, of course :)

After our successful start with our first Adcloud TechTalk we are proud to announce our second talk: Why the SOLID principles matter - even for JavaScript.

Even though the famous SOLID design principles where invented in the context of more classical object-oriented languages like C++ and Java, the fundamental principles are enormously useful way beyond the concrete programming environment and by far not restricted to a concrete programming language. And having a well-structured code base is one of the most important factors to keep software flexible and changeable over time.

Martin Lippert (co-founder of it-agile GmbH and now working at VMware on developer tooling for JavaScript, Spring, and Cloud Foundry, tweets @martinlippert) will give an overview of the SOLID principles, explain why they are so important, talk about what happens if you ignore them, and dive into some examples for JavaScript.

The event will be on Tuesday, 22nd May in our office: Venloer Str. 25-27, Cologne. Doors open at 17:00. Talk starts 17:30. Event ends around 19:00.

Although the event is free we ask you to register since space is limitted:

Update: We are out of space. Stay tuned for the next talk.

We are happy to announce our first public Adcloud TechTalk:

Chaplin – JavaScript Application Architecture with Backbone.js

Backbone.js is a small JavaScript library which helps building JavaScript-driven web applications. It’s widely used by companies like LinkedIn, Groupon, Foursquare and 37Signals. While Backbone.js is a good starting point, it is quite limited and does not provide a top-level architecture for scalable Web applications.

Mathias Schäfer of 9elements will introduce Chaplin, a field-tested application architecture on top of Backbone.js. Chaplin establishes conventions on how to structure an application and addresses the requirements of growing JavaScript applications. Like Backbone.js itself, Chaplin is free and open-source.

The event will be on Wednesday, 25th April in our office: Venloer Str. 25-27, Cologne. Doors open at 17:00. Talk starts 17:30. Event ends around 19:00.

Although the event is free we ask you to register since space is limitted:

Looking forward to this and hopefully more events like this.

We are happy announce a new (hopefully) regular event: Adcloud TechTalks. These are informal meetings around technical challenges which we face, topics which we would like to know more about or things which we just find interesting. Speakers will range from internal developers and local friends to invited industry experts.

Our goal is to learn new things and foster the software development culture in Cologne.

These events will take place weekdays in the late afternoon. Doors open at 17:00. The talk starts at 17:30 and we calculate around 45 minutes for the talk and approx 45 minutes of discussion. Concrete dates will be announced a couple of weeks prior to the talk in this blog and via @adcloud.

All events will be open to the public, although we will require some form of registration. Stay tuned for the first event.