CocoaHeads: April 2016 Meeting – Rogue Tech Talks ©

Lots of attendees tonight, including a couple of visitors who only stayed long enough to say hi and meet everyone; hope they will return—and stay—next month.

The discussions included commentary about the Danny Boyle movie, Steve Jobs, and the feelings the movie evoked. While almost universally panned for inaccuracies, this superbly-crafted movie (screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and Walter Isaacson, who wrote the biography the movie was based upon) focuses on Steve’s relationships with the five closest people in his life: his daughter (Lisa Brennan; played by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine); his assistant (Joanna Hoffman; played by Kate Winslet); his Apple Co-Founder (Steve Wozniak; played by Seth Rogan); his surrogate father and Apple CEO (John Sculley, played by Jeff Daniels); and the primary architect of the MacIntosh O.S. (Andy Hertzfeld, played by Michael Stuhlbarg). Michael Fassbender’s edgy portrayal of Steve captures the combination of marketing genius and impersonal detachment that he presented to the world while dealing with his internal demons. The Special Features Section of the DVD was quite enlightening.

Chatter was focused on networking; attendees looking to locate local companies who may be offering jobs. Other topics included suggestions for future workshops (online IDEs like nitrous.io, used in today’s Ruby Tech Workshop); latest networking activities among groups like SOGGy (Southern Oregon Geek Group; meets First Thursdays at Four Daughters Pub on East Main in Medford, 6:30 p.m.); and the upcoming Tech Talk where Andrew Krug is scheduled to speak about Preparing for Incidents in the Cloud: a basic overview of what can be achieved by using services like AWS Config and Lambda to create automated security pipelines. Andrew is an SOU Alumnus, specializing in computer security.

Great food, good beer and lots of cheer! See you next month, following the Refactoring Tech Workshop, conducted by Randy Coulman, Senior Software Engineer (code name “Refactron”) at Zeal (Randy’s picture is in row 2, column 2 on this page; click the logo for Zeal’s Home Page). Be there (Marion Ady Building, MA110, in the SOU Art Complex)! Be on time (3:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.)! Mark your calendar (Second Thursday, May 12, 2016)! Be ready to learn how to tighten-up your code!