Press Pass at The Iron Yard Demo Day

After watching PIE Day,  I knew I wanted to get involved in the growing Durham start-up community. After meeting a student for The Iron Yard at All Things Open, I found a good way to start.  The Iron Yard graciously gave me a press pass for their December 12 Demo Day.    Here is my overview of the event:

What is Demo Day at  Iron Yard? 
Demo Day is the culmination of 12 weeks learning Ruby on Rails.   From what I hear this is 12 weeks of intense, long hours and lots of fun collaboration.

 Projects

• Ramblethru - Ease of Trip Planning - Danielle Heckman, Greg Burton, Noah Holmes
  WHEEEE!   Time to have fun planning a trip http://www.ramblethru.com/
  Note: These guys are pros at the demo, perfect recorded movie, beautiful hand-offs, smooth story of how, why, and what. 
• Compass - Ease of Voting - Vance Faulkner, Will Russell
  In the spirit of follow the money, Vance and Will have a way to do that in http://www.civic-compass.org/
  Note: Props for the live demo 
• Word Lattice - Fun with Words - Geoffrey Purdy
• Clipboard for SEEDS - Ease of Volunteering - David Perry, Rebecca Conley, Peter Byrne -github project
  It is impressive to see tech in action.   Rebecca, Dave and Peter captured the heart of their key stakeholder.   Impressive to see a 3 week project end in a real useful project.
  Note: Props to Rebecca for connecting to the audience.   
• Smart Shopper - Ease of Lists - Michael Harris
  Note: Smart demo and great use of background to tell the story.   Double props for going Android first.  
• Lunchpad - Ease of School Lunches - DeeDee Lavinder, Kheang Lim, Nick Passarella
  Note: DeeDee did  a nice job of reading the audience to know we were not buying the app but the approach and education. 

The details of the apps are interesting, but the best part is the approach and technology.   

Technology

• Technology used by multiple projects: JavaScript (6), Ruby on Rails (5), jQuery (4), HTML5 (4), CSS3 (4), SASS (4), Heroku (4),  RSpec (3), Postgres (3),  Trello(3) Middleman (2), Bourbon/Neat/Bitters (2), Paperclip (2)
• APIs: Foursquare API, Yelp API, Reddit API, Instagram API, Campaign Finance API, Sunlight API, Govtrack API, MapLight API, Semantics3 API
• JavaScript Libraries: Mapbox.js,Underscore.js, HighchartsJS
• Other technologies: Geocoder,  SendGrid, Photoshop CC, AWS S3,  Foundation,  NY Times, Travis,  Foundation, Middleman, Geocoder,  Sidkiq, Neo4j, Cypher, Appcelerator Titanium SDK, Appcelerator Alloy framework, JSON, XML,  bash scripting,  Salesforce, Omniauth, Restforce,     Foundation,  Capybara and Travis, Titanium, SQLite, Android SDK, Travis, AWS,Lucid Chart, Trello, Sketch, Devise, Stripe, Oauth 2.0

Hashtag #tiydurham #poweredbysb
Twitter Handles :  
 @smashingboxes,
@TheIronYard 

And in honor of our downtown Durham startups, here is some Mark Ronson Uptown Funk 

PS> How can one not love a song with lines like " Make a dragon wanna retire man" and "Smoother than a fresh jar of skippy"

Code for Durham - Cheat Sheet

Durham knows how to "Find Your Cool".   It also knows how to find its heart.   One place is at the local Code for America group.  Adam Martin and his band of tech volunteers are making a difference by putting code to data to explore Durham issues of inequality, environment, and more, all close to home.

The team from Caktus Group was well represented and deep into an education navigation application.

I am now two events in and ready to create a personal cheat sheet of the areas I want to explore. 

• Overview of School Navigator  : http://school-navigator.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
• GitHub Project for Education Navigation : https://github.com/codefordurham/school-navigator
• Use Case Discussion : http://forum.codefornc.com/t/school-navigator/93
• IBM DevOps Project : https://hub.jazz.net/project/ginnyb/CodeForDurhamSchoolNav/overview 
• Code for Durham Meetup : http://www.meetup.com/Triangle-Code-for-America/events/219026901/

[update: added IDS and Meetup links]
It was a fun night and I came home very excited about the group.   I also realize how much work I need to put in to start contributing.  

Riptide feels like a good closing song