I've been impressed with Dark -- it has the potential to make it possible to build a scalable cloud application in an afternoon and reduce application complexity. This has a number of impacts long-term, from both making existing teams more productive, to bringing less sophisticated developers to participate in application development. I highly recommend you check it out.
[Disclosure - I'm an investor in the company, but my thoughts are my own.]
This is a 2015 New Year's Resolution, so the matchmaking doesn't kick-in until 2015. The purpose of the form is to accumulate a list of mentors and mentees who are committing to this pledge.
The event doesn't really need more promotion -- it's already the largest developer conference in history. We're trying to raise money for a dozen non-profits in the coding space, and all money goes to them, not us -- so I'm not going to lose too much sleep if the event gets some more exposure incidentally from my reply to offer someone a free ticket.
If you read my bio, I think you'll see that I understand the demographic quite well -- http://about.me/Edro
Thanks for bringing this up. My name is Ed Roman, and I'm the CEO of hack.hands(). I'm sorry if our expert onboarding approach was offensive in any way to you. As a young startup, we're still learning as we go and adjusting our approaches.
In case it's valuable to you, I'd like to offer you a free pass to a virtual conference we're holding, at hacksummit.org. This event has some of the best programmers in the world educating you, while raising money for coding charities. You can use the code ZACH to get through registration without any hassle.
I'm happy to chat further over email about any concerns you may have at [email protected].
Just so that this doesn't get buried in the comments, here's a repost: We have a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at http://hacksummit.org
I think that's a great idea. We really wanted to accept bitcoin but ran out of engineering bandwidth. We were looking at dogecoin too. I hope developers who are unable to pay in cash will still join us through sharing on social media (or if you're a hackernews member, using the free promotion code mentioned elsewhere in these comments).
Thanks for the feedback Martin. We're continuing to onboard additional speakers to further diversify our roster. The non-profits are helping us in this reach-out via introductions.
Thanks Peter. We are working closely with the founder of Crowdcast. He's an incredible programmer and we're lucky to have him helping us. He benefits tangentially from this exposure.
BTW, here is a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at http://hacksummit.org
Tom Chi (co-creator Google Glass)
- Grady Booch (creator the Unified Modeling Language)
- David Heinemeier Hansson (inventor of Ruby on Rails)
- Brian Fox (invented the GNU Bash shell)
- Rebecca Parsons (CTO, Thoughtworks)
- Hakon Wium Lie (inventor of CSS)
- Alex Gaynor (Director, Python Software Foundation, and core committer to Django)
- Sarah Allen (Presidential Innovation Fellow, led development for many Adobe products)
- Gilad Bracha (co-author of the Java Language Specification)
- Kent Beck (creator of Extreme Programming, created Test Driven Development, co-created Agile, author of 9 books)
- Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki, contributed to Extreme Programming, co-author of Design Patterns)
- Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent)
- Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass, Haml, m.wikipedia.org, book author)
- Matei Zaharia (creator of Apache Spark)
- Melody Meckfessel (Google Director of Engineering)
- Jon Skeet (the top answerer on StackOverflow)
- Scott Hanselman (author of multiple books)
- Jeff Haynie (founder of Appcelerator)
- Ryan Bubinski (founder of Codecademy)
- Aaron Skonnard (founder of Pluralsight)
- Floyd Marinescu (founder of InfoQ)
- Steve Newcomb (founder of Famo.us)
- Orion Henry (founder of Heroku)
- Janet Wiener (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert)
- Scott Chacon (CIO, Github)
- Chad Fowler (CTO, Wunderlist, well-known programming educator and blogger)
- Salil Deshpande (open source investor titan)
- Hadi Partovi (founder of Code.org, was in charge of Internet Explorer, advisor to Dropbox and Facebook)
- Qi Lu (EVP, Microsoft)