A few weeks ago the San Francisco NoSQL Meetup Group held its first meeting at CBS Interactive in San Francisco with the topic of Riak at Appush presented by Dan Reverri from Appush. I had not previously heard of Riak so before attending the talk I very briefly looked up what it is. I discovered it was a key-value created by Basho and since I had been doing some reading about Redis and Voldemort that was enough information to get me interested. After the talk, thanks to Dan’s great presentation, I discovered Riak has a lot more capabilities than just a simple key-value store. More…

Several months ago I downloaded a copy of Selenium to evaluate how we could use it to improve automated acceptance or functional testing at Spoke. It was quite an useful tool but we didn’t have cycles for setting up some sort of infrastructure for running the tests. When I saw there was going to be an upcoming meetup, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to get inspired on using Selenium again and also learn what is new in the world of Selenium. On April 20, 2010 I attended the San Francisco Selenium Meetup at Sauce Labs (the folks behind Selenium) where the topic of the evening was “Testing Tools Demo Night.” The night included 4 speakers and demos and an opportunity to talk to the folks at Sauce Labs about their products. I even won 1000 minutes of Sauce OnDemand. More…

Although I am not a Redis user, yet, I do have an interest in NOSQL (Not Only SQL) data storage and Redis has come up in readings and discussions as a very slick piece of technology. I figured that the First San Francisco Redis Meetup would be a good opportunity to find out more about Redis and how other software developers and companies have deployed it. Even though I was one of two or three who have not used Redis, this meetup met my expectations. More…