MMWC doesn't have its own fiber but does have access to KINBER's PennREN fiber network, a little-known gem in the commonwealth that happens to run down Fifth Ave and a few other main roads in the city. We're working on rolling out access to it. As we're a donations- and grant-funded non-profit, our rollout will be slower than a commercial operation.
Pittsburgh has a lot of fiber running through it, but most of it is commercial backbone fiber. One data center that I know of had 12 ISPs peering with it, and that was in 2009. Only Verizon FiOS has executed a residential rollout in the city, and you can read more about folks opinions on that in /r/pittsburgh.
I've passed this thread to the MMWC executive team for them to add more detail!
Arcadia.io | Software Engineer | Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Boston, MA, USA | ONSITE/REMOTE | Full time
Arcadia.io is a privately-owned healthcare analytics company founded in 2002 and based in the Boston, Massachusetts area with offices in Burlington, Massachusetts; Rockford, Illinois; Seattle, Washington; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with dozens of remote employees nationwide.
Phrased succinctly, we use patient records to help doctors tell patients how they can be healthier and how they can get better when they're sick by enabling those doctors to see a patient's record with every doctor they see.
We have a variety of positions available:
* Senior Software Engineer
* Software Engineer, Systems Generalist
* Software Engineer, Backend Web Development
* Software Engineer - Data Warehouse
* Software Engineer in Data Pipeline Integration
* and more
The main technologies we use are Ruby (on Rails), Scala (Spark, Scalatra web services), Groovy (Gradle and some other in-house stuff + Apache NiFi), and we even have some Rust (CLI app on Windows and Linux!), Python, and JavaScript apps. We're very much about using the right tool for the job, even if that means spending some time learning that tool. We're _really_ big on automation: we're in the middle of scaling our tech to grow our capacity by an order of magnitude within the next two years.
Our [careers link][1] is the best place to read more and apply. Feel free to ask questions via PM, too. I'm based out of Pittsburgh and I'm a hiring manager for some of the positions.
We're working on it at Meta Mesh Wireless Communities, a non-profit company putting together a mesh network in Pittsburgh as an educational and equipment-producing effort. Our AP150 is getting some attention and has been a cool platform for us to ship our mesh configuration.
The pictures of the laptop are exactly the same device I have sitting in my lap right now. The NexDock of course has no computer inside it: it's a keyboard, touchpad, SD reader, USB hub, and display.
I own an affected model. The exchange program is seemingly not worth it. My compensation offer was $295 if I purchased a Samsung replacement, $195 for non-Samsung. I chose the "repair" because those amounts were approximately 25% at best the cost of a suitable replacement. I have several dogs, so I do a lot of laundry daily and need an expensive unit geared toward large families because of it.
I use mosh daily and love it. It's great for moving around the office and maintaining a connection - no accidental hups, no real need to use screen or nohup.
My one beef with it is that it effectively defeats my terminal emulator's scroll bar. Need to scroll back the output? Nope. You have to use less or more profusely.
These videos look amazing on just about any screen. I've got a 15" MBP Retina connected to a 34" Dell Ultrawide and I've caught people just _staring_ at the big screen with many of these videos.
Go out a county in any direction and the culture leans racist. But in Allegheny County, with a few exceptions, the level of racism seems more-or-less passive, a.k.a. Wendy Bell Racism (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wendy+bell).
I'm not saying that it's not a problem where it happens, but I guess I have the fortune/privilege of observing it so rarely despite living in an suburban borough that is 29.25% White, 66.51% African American according to the 2010 census. I admit that I don't patronize its lone business district very often.
In the city, though, I don't have incidents in my memory that I can cite as evidence that racism is "huge" in Pittsburgh. Big incidents are in the minds of many, e.g. Jordan Miles incident (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jordan+miles) and to my knowledge and memory, are the exception, not the rule. Then again, I spend most of my time in the East End, which is pretty segregated.
I do concede the lack of diversity in Pittsburgh's tech scene though. The only quantification I have of it is C&S's meetup attendance, which is approximately 10% people of color on average (women = 20%). The number of PoC attending have been slowly but steadily increasing but the number of women fluctuates. We're working on encouraging both demographics to attend!
PIT's "AirMall" was a fantastic concept. I grew about an hour north of the airport and we'd go shopping at the airport frequently. 9/11 basically killed it and much of the expansion of the airport. The 2008 Recession didn't help, either. AirMall business did eventually bounce back to pre-2001 levels in the last few years. I'll bet that if the gov't ever relaxed the security theater of the TSA, the mall could be booming again.
There are some big things happening in Pittsburgh:
Code & Supply (http://codeandsupply.co) is growing very quickly. It is just more than two years old and has nearly 2,200 members of its Meetup group. It holds 6-10 meetups per month, ranging from language talks to toolkits, WiFi, mental health, design, career management, and more.
C&S is hosting Abstractions (http://abstractions.io), probably the largest ever software conference in Pittsburgh. It's in August and will likely sell out of its 1,500 tickets at the current rate (40% sold as of this writing). We've got big names speaking, like Stallman, Zeldman, Sandi Metz, Scott Hanselman, Mike Montiero, Raffi Krikorian, Mitchell Hashimoto, Joe Armstrong, Larry Wall, Allison Randal, Aaron Patterson, Jono Bacon, Kelsey Hightower, and lots more. The full lineup will be announced in May.
Disclosure: I am an organizer of both.
There are lots of other meetups that are big, too. PGH Python just merged into C&S. The PGH FP meetup is growing quickly, too. Pittsburgh hosted Midwest UX last year and Pittsburgh Web Design Day is a pretty big event.
TL;DR the Pittsburgh software community is booming.
