Tired of hearing about the ever-so… nebulous “Cloud” and what vendors say it will do for humankind? Yeah, us too. So, why won’t it just go away? We found some folks who have used the cloud successfully to strike it big and asked them to show us why it made such a big difference to them. We were surprised, and now we’re going to share it with you.

• Learn how cloud computing can help you today from those who actually use it—not from those who want to sell it to you
• See how the cloud makes it possible for small companies to be successful in big ways
• Get valuable tips on how you can get started right away
• Find out how you can “cloud proof” your development even if you are not in the cloud today
• Discover where the cloud is going, and why you can’t afford to ignore it

When: November 30th, 12:00 PM – 4:30 PM Eastern Time
Where: On-line (In the cloud, where else would we host it?)

Schedule

* All times are in EST.

Topics:

“Gimme the cloud”

When we set out to build Gimme Bar, we wanted to focus on just that: building it. We didn’t have much patience, time, or money (we’re bootstrapped) to spend on procuring servers, managing huge amounts of hosted storage, or dealing with networking equipment. “The Cloud” was the obvious choice.

Gimme Bar is deployed mainly with Amazon’s cloud technologies: S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancer, Cloud Watch, other non-AWS bits such as Mailgun and SendGrid, and some cloud-friendly technologies like MongoDB and ElasticSearch.

In this talk, I’ll give a high level overview of the services we use and how we use them, some tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way, and I’ll try to convey my general feeling of peace about our infrastructure which allows me (as de facto sysadmin) to focus on my real job: building the app, not the environment that hosts the app.

“What’s this “cloud” stuff I keep hearing about and how do I use it?”

In this talk, learn about the various cloud based services which are out there and how to get up to speed quickly on each. Should you go with Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud or Linode? Maybe Heroku or Google App Engine or Joyent’s no.de service? Each has their specific use cases, so learn why you would pick one vs the other. While it’s interesting to learn the overview, don’t stop there! Dig right in and follow along getting up to speed quickly on several of the most popular options. This is a hands on talk, so be ready to follow along as we present the getting started section!

PHP & MongoDB

An introduction to using MongoDB with PHP. Introducing MongoDB and why it’s a good match for PHP and instructing on basic schema design in MongoDB. Demonstrating how to connect to the database, perform CRUD operations and perform queries. Finally, summarize the community tools and libraries availble in PHP and why one would use them.

“Scrappy and Enterprise-y. How The Cloud Is Now Enabling Startups To Compete With The Giants.”

Moontoast has leveraged Amazon Web Services to deploy an infrastructure that performs digital delivery, PCI compliant transaction processing, media streaming and rapid creation of highly functional storefronts. In this session, Marcus Whitney, CTO and Co-Founder of Moontoast, will share how leveraging the cloud has enabled things not before possible for a scrappy startup, and has put them in a position to partner with some of the largest brands and tech platforms in the world.

Speakers

Sean Coates

Sean has been developing web applications professionally for over a decade. In the past, he’s worked in various positions, from managing a team of developers at OmniTI, to developing payment code that processed over one million dollars per day, to working as the Editor in Chief of php|architect magazine, where he also organized PHP conferences.

He has long been a contributing member of the PHP community, having worked heavily on the PHP manual in addition to maintaining PEAR and PECL code. He has spoken on the topic of PHP at renowned conferences, and contributes to open source projects.

Sean’s days are spent working on Gimme Bar, and so are most of his evenings—at least the parts he’s not enjoying or brewing a fine pint of homebrew or sour beer.

Steve Francia

Steve is the Chief Solutions Architect at 10gen where he leads the application engineering organization. Prior to 10gen Steve led OpenSky to become the first ecommerce site powered by MongoDB and one of the first PHP sites backed by MongoDB. His previous roles include CIO/COO at Portero, VP of Development at Takkle and Founder & CTO of Supernerd. Steve has a long history with PHP contributing to many open source projects including authoring the Zoop Framework, the first object oriented framework for PHP. Other contributions include MongoDB, Doctrine and Symfony2.

Kirsten Jones

Kirsten Jones has been working in software development for almost 20 years. After starting her geek life as a systems administrator and tool builder, she moved into software design at Cisco, where she stayed for several years before jumping into the Web 2.0 revolution. Her social and collaborative experience has ranged from Socialtext to the think tank AMI, to Netflix, and now LinkedIn.
Her passion is in using facets and semantic ideas to bring more powerful browsing experiences to users. Kirsten has long been a fan of Freebase, building several different applications to leverage the power of their language and database. Her iPhone application (the Intersect for Netflix) demonstrates this focus, allowing anyone to browse the Netflix catalog using facets.

Jeremy Johnstone

Jeremy Johnstone has been working in various positions in the Internet field for over 17 years. From starting a dialup ISP back in the day when most people didn’t know what the Internet even was, to building out a web hosting company with it’s own data center, to working for the company who formed many people’s ideas of what the web is working on teams ranging from the largest email and messenger products in the world, to cutting edge technology architecting a platform to bring Internet content into the living room.

His passion is in using Javascript on virtually every platform and device possible. Jeremy has extensive experience running Javascript in the browser, on servers, mobile devices, and even mainstream TVs sold by Samsung, Vizio, Sony, LG, and Toshiba among others. He is also very passionate about iOS and tech gadgets in general owning many of the major mobile phone/tablet devices including every model of iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch sold. When not geeking out on the latest tech gadget, Jeremy is actively trying to change the world, one developer at a time, through initiatives like Random Hacks of Kindness, an organization he cofounded along with representatives from Google, Microsoft, NASA, and the World Bank.

Marcus Whitney

Prior to launching Moontoast, Mr. Whitney served as a partner and Director of Technology at Emma, a unique email marketing company focused on innovative creative approaches and exceptional customer service. He and his team built Emma’s entire email marketing platform from the ground up, enabling Emma to become a multi-million dollar business and grow its customer base to over 10,000 customers in his four-year tenure. Prior to Emma, Mr. Whitney worked for Nashville-based Firesign where he oversaw design, testing and installation of Firesign’s dynamic, real-time, streaming digital signage server. Mr. Whitney began his career as a content programmer for HealthStream, a national leader in health learning systems.

Sponsors: