braden allchin

In SF - piecing a life together. It may be busy but its still the calm before the storm of crazyness.

Officially graduated. Leaving shortly for the long drive back to Boston.

This past weekend was the third BarCamp held at RIT, BarCampRochester3 and I had hanging over my head being one of the hosts pulling it together mostly in the last two weeks leading up to it. I’ll put up pictures on Flickr (tag: barcamprochester3), but as for now my snaps are on Facebook. As for slides, I was going to tweak them for my Public Speaking class as I have an “informative presentation” to give this week and I’ll put them up via SlideShare and post it here along with a presentation made for my Grid Computing “class”.

I think the best part of the event is the type of people we attracted to it - smart, interesting and dedicated individuals that wanted to learn from others and it is those people who take the reigns. I felt like there were so many great people there and I was able to talk to many but not all of them. Aside from the event being a fun place to learn about cool subjects, its the perfect networking event. Chatting it up with those who I will see again out in SF was great and talking about the current and future state of web applications (coincidentally my talk) kept me energized for the entire day. Well, that and the wonderful Coke products we bought (RIT is a Pepsi campus) like Hi-C! I mean come on, it was a huge hit and completely brought us back to the carefree days of running around outside after elementary school was out.

I’d also like to give a big shout-out to those who were able to come, specifically those not in the area like Jordan Sissel (SF), Jason Morrison (Boston), David Recordon (SF), Justin Thorp (DC) and John Resig (Boston). Many people were psyched at how well it went and although I may be leaving, others are ready and willing to pull together an even bigger one come this fall. So glad that I was able to be a part of it before I go - definitely can’t wait to particpate in more meetups!

Lets see how short of a post I can make, as many many many things have been going on. First off, lets dig a little deeper into what I was able to do over my spring break just over two weeks ago. School wound down and allowed me to plan out an incredibly packed trip to SF, where almost every meal I had was with friends and former co-workers along with interviews at a few small companies in the area. After losing sleep for two nights thinking about my future, I ended up signing an offer letter to Widgetbox.com to be a software developer upon graduation. I’m still a bit stunned that I was able to find such a great place, located right within the city with incredibly smart and dedicated people building out their widget platform. I really am chomping at the bit to get my hands dirty and working with them, so as soon as I was back at school I picked up a few books on Hibernate and JSP and spec’ed out a few small applications I could build to give me both a refresher in Java and teach me Java-based web development. It’s actually going to be quite trippy migrating from a C# / ASP.NET web development background to Java, which has about 7 years more time to mature.

As much as I do want to start hacking around, school started up and beat me down before I could say, “Last quarter partying!” I’m in the process of pulling out of a class I was re-taking (Assembly / CPU-design) to concentrate on Entrepreneurship and Grid Computing (check out me on the wiki!) which has become something between a part-time and full-time job. We need to build out a business plan over the course of the quarter in Entrepreneurship, which will involve some solid groupwork, but the part that makes me bite my knuckles is the analysis of case studies we have to follow that we only get a few days to do. Not a fan. GC on the other hand, is a straight up graduate course that is pure research. Already we’ve had to cook up presentations, dig through research papers, and right now I’m in the process of trying to solidify a project proposal for the entire quarter thats due this Thursday. I’m incredibly excited on what I’ll be working on and the fact that I’ll be writing an excellent paper on it will make IEEE/ACM editors glow with delight is simply awesome. Once I fall into a somewhat organized cycle in getting everything done, I’ll drop interesting notes about it here.

My mind has been non-stop churning along since last Sunday, and will probably continue to do so until after BarCamp is completed. I think I’m also having some sort of cold right now, combined with wild headaches with the mind in overdrive and the lungs complaining from a run I pushed myself too hard too fast on (somewhat out of shape plus cold weather) is just adding to the blend that is me currently.

It looks like I’ll be running full steam ahead until graduation.

To continue with random bursts my thoughts, here is a bit more of what is new and exciting with me -

In a few weeks, I’m off to spend almost a week in San Francisco, clocking in more JetBlue miles (to no avail - I won’t be able to get the free round-trip ticket) to spend my spring break mingling with folks. A rough itinerary is thrown together, but it will get packed with fun lunches, dinners and drinks with people. I’m psyched to be staying at the Hotel Boheme, right in the middle of North Beach. The prices were excellent and right around the corner was where I used to live, so a smidge of comfort of being around my old stomping grounds of last spring and summer will come back to me.

I do have a dopplr.com account and I did tag that I’m going out west but I simply don’t travel enough nor do I know many people around the country that would use such a service to maintain contacts who are a bit more “mobile”. It’s neat, but I’m stuck with the problem of hooking in others to actively use it. Maybe when I’m some wild business traveler it will come in handy.

I’ve also somehow managed to find myself being more open to mingling with anyone interesting I’ve come across. I don’t know what it is, but its probably a combination of me seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and wanting to use up what time I have left here with those also looking towards the future and possibly finally being able to meet like-minded people. I guess it makes sense that it was bound to happen towards the end of my college career instead of at the beginning, because by now most (well, some) have at least a general idea of what is happening after graduation. RIT is definitely a career-minded school, and those that enroll here generally are on a track for entering the workforce. Still, meeting new people and spending time with old ones is excellent.

I can’t wait to join the Kickball league in SF.