Justin Carmony » utah

Letter to Senator Lee

Justin Carmony — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:19:47 +0000

My letter to Senator Lee:

Senator Lee,

My name is Justin Carmony, and I am the C.T.O. for Dating DNA, LLC, a company that makes iPhone Apps. This is my first time writing a senator, but I feel it is important to convey my thoughts on SOPA and PIPA.

We have struggled with people downloading our Apps from 3rd Party Websites and not paying for them. We are able to monitor and track these “cracked” apps when they connect to our services, and these “cracked apps” number in the hundreds of thousands over time. That is potentially millions of dollars in lost revenue.

However, I do NOT support SOPA, PIPA, or bills like it that give “blacklist” or “takedown” authority without due process.

Even though we struggle with piracy, these bills will do very little in preventing unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. However, they are extremely dangerous in terms of abuse against legitimate businesses. Even though the cost of piracy can be great, we already have tools and laws to help us minimize piracy. We work hard at providing a great service, and we’ve even successfully turned “pirates” into “legal, legitimate customers.” SOPA & PIPA will do very little in helping us stop real piracy, but will also expose us to “takedowns claims” without any oversight or due process.

There is already testimonies on legal records of Media Companies such as Warner Music and Universal Music group admitting to using DMCA to take down content they had no copyright ownership to. Their motives instead were to silence groups being critical of them. (see “A Business Person’s SOPA Primer” — http://avoidingagoatrodeo.com/2011/12/26/a-businesspersons-sopa-primer/)

Please, as my elected representative, pull your support of SOPA. Our small business would not survive a “takedown” if a competitor used SOPA with false claims. We depend on the internet to keep us in business. I hope you can see, and understand, that due process and legal oversight should still apply to the internet.

Thank you,

Justin Carmony
Utah Citizen

UTOSC 2010

Justin Carmony — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:10:19 +0000

One thing I haven’t mentioned much this year is the Utah Open Source Conference that is being held in two weeks. Larry Cafiero, a.k.a Larry the Fedora Guy, has written a nice summary of how he feels UTOSC “has been building up to a top-notch, not-to-be-missed show.”

During the course of the year, the FOSS traveling salvation show in North America wends its way around the nation to end up, finally, at the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) in Salt Lake City in October before taking a hiatus for the holidays. Then of course the new year, FOSS-wise, starts with the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in February.

There’s only one word for those who might want to skip the last-of-the-year Linux expo: “Don’t!”

Quietly and with little fanfare, UTOSC has been building up to a top-notch, not-to-be-missed show that is beginning to draw deserved attention — and people — from outside immediate Utah area. In fact, in the last four years it has grown to become the best community computer conference in the Mountain West.

UTOSC will be held from Oct. 7-9 at the Miller Campus of Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City. Attendees who register before Saturday can save 30 percent on the price of admission to the three-day event. Regular admission to UTOSC is $70 for a full-access pass, $25 for an expo pass with entrance to try-it lab workshops and $15 for an expo pass.

I’ll give you a little hint: You can get %50 off if you register with the Discount Code UPHPU. So I highly recommend if you would like to learn about some very cool software that is free, to check it out. Unfortunately, this year I won’t be presenting, since I kind of got busy and forgot to get my abstract in before the deadline. Probably next year then.

Teaching PHP This Year

Justin Carmony — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:34:41 +0000

I will be giving short presentations on PHP for beginners at the monthly Utah PHP Usergroup. Here is the annoucement:

Greets all,

Being in my seat, I’ve heard from many people over the course of this past
year who have lost / changed employment. I know there is concern by many
who are employed as to what will happen long term. The reality of the matter
is this, though. Recession or no, change happens and the best way to be
ready for it is to have a great skill set. To that end, we are
restructuring the way our meetings will be.

New Meeting Structure
We will be splitting our PHP meetings into 2 parts. First part is basic
skills / best practices training. This is for you new guys who want to
learn, but don’t know where to start. This section is called PHP
fundamentals and will be hosted by Justin Carmony. He and I are working on
some printed materials and are ramping this up as we speak. We also have
several very senior and tenured members who are VERY friendly to questions.
The second portion of our meeting will be a more advanced topic that will be
of benefit to intermediate / advanced members, but will still be of great
benefit to those who are new.

Still Social!
For those interested in the social aspect of our meeting, we still have the
famous UPHPU Afterhours party.

Resources
As far as learning resources, Ray Hunter and I are working on having books
available at our meetings. While we will have some fun / zany way of
handing out the books, there is an understood condition of receiving the
book. You MUST write a review of the book and post it online. If you don’t
want to write a review, don’t take the book. I will be breaking arms on
this!

Online Resources
I know that our recordings have been sporadic. i’m working on allocating
more time to this.

Whew! All that said, here is the meeting info:

Meeting Thursday, January 21st at 7pm @ Bill Good Marketing in Draper

Bill Good Marketing
12393 Gateway Park Place
Draper, Ut 84020

PHP Fundamentals by Justin Carmony – RTFM – Reading the Fabulous Manual
For a new person to PHP, reading the documentation can be a daunting task.
Even worse when you have legions of other developers screaming the acronym
“RTFM!” Hopefully we can shed some light on how to get the most out of PHP
Documentation, how to search it, how to understand it, and how to get help
if the documentation doesn’t answer your questions. Justin Carmony will be
giving the presentation, and will leave time for questions. You’re not alone
in learning PHP, let the Utah PHP Usergroup help you.

Justin Carmony has worked in web development professionally for the last
five years. With emphasis on PHP, .NET, and Web Services, he has worked on
projects ranging from simple websites to complex communications between
thousands of remote systems. He currently is working as an independent
contractor & private consultant. If you have any questions, comments, or
curiosities you can contact him (justin AT justincarmony DOT com) or read
about his latest endeavors at his blog.

Advanced Topic by Trevor Sharpe – Basic Linux Server Administration
Many programmers are finding themselves needing to understand and administer
linux servers. This presentation is focused on learning how to effectively
use the server through scripts, etc. Q & A session on admining to follow.

Trevor Sharpe is a Systems Administrator for a company in SLC and is also a
board member for Utah Open Source.

Look forward to seeing everyone this year!

My 2009 Technology Recap

Justin Carmony — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:55:31 +0000

Its been two years now that I’ve been a more or less “serious blogger.” I had using the term blogger, since when people hear about blogs, they think of people either detailing their entire lives, or pumping some angel. For me, blogging has just been a way to share information with people I know locally, and those I don’t even know who find my blog via searching. I’ve had a few spurts where I blogged quite frequently, but for the most part it was just here and there.

I’ve gone back and looked at this year of 2009, and the things I’ve blogged about, and I thought I’d give a little recap.

My CSS Conversion

At the beginning of the year I realized I had 100% percent to using CSS. I’m still a little in awe that being such a table junkie I finally did it. There were a few key things that I did to help me learn all the difficult things with CSS. I hope I can help some poor web developer out there understand their CSS a little better.

A Year of PHP IDEs

I really invested some time in trying out and experimenting with several PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I had been using Zend Studio for several years, however more and more I found myself frustrated with it’s quirks. However, I haven’t had time yet to blog about the new IDE I am using, NetBeans. I’ve made the switch from Zend Studio to NetBeans, and while I’m not completely sold, I’m still giving it some time. Maybe over christmas break I’ll blog some about it.

Interesting Challenges w/ MySQL

While I haven’t blogged about most of them, I have had some interesting challenges w/ MySQL over the last year. One was converting 40 Million rows from a MyISAM engine to an InnoDB Engine. I’ve been having some serious heart-to-heart conversations with MySQL (metaphorically of course) on how I’m going to scale it to millions and billions of rows. I think I’ve mapped out in my head how we’re going to handle it for Dating DNA. That will be one challenge I’ll be addressing in 2010.

New Blog Design

This year I got around to re-designing my blog using the Carrington Theme as a base. I kinda like it, but it still could use a little more polish. One day I’ll find time to give it that extra polish.

Memcached

This year I really got into the theory on how to design an application with Memcached. I’ve decreased the load on several websites by using it, and wrote an in-depth article on the theory of caching, and how to implement it effectively. I’ve been amazed at how well it works, and that I hadn’t used it before.

A Year of Presentations

I’ve given two presentations this year, my Memcached presentation at UPHPU, and my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference. I got great feedback from both presentations, and I look forward to what I’ll present on this upcoming year. I’m thinking about putting together a presentation called “Being a Web Ninja with jQuery,” and showing of the dozen of awesome applications I’ve built using jQuery.

Utah Open Source Conference 2009

This year I helped organize and throw together the Utah Open Source Conference. I was made the Sponsorship Manager, and it was interesting trying to talk to companies in a recession about donating to a non-profit conference. I haven’t had a chance to blog about different techniques on how to professional ask for money for something like this, but hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to share some insights.

Things I Didn’t Blog About

There were a lot of things I didn’t get around to blogging about this year. I’ll quickly touch on them here, and hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to blog about them more.

Web Services – I’ve done a LOT of web service work. Web services provide a unique challenge, since many times its hard to debug them. At my old job, one of the biggest challenges is we really couldn’t debug our web services until all of the other pieces of the puzzle were done. Then we spent long hours with trial and error, debugging via dumping logs. I’ve learned a lot of tricks with PHP and web services. Hopefully I’ll be blog more about those soon.

Performance Tuning LAMP – I’ve had to do a lot of tuning to keep the Dating DNA website afloat. Because of the awesomeness of our iPhone apps, we’ve had a lot of load on our web servers. There are a lot of things you can do to get the LAMP stack to run well.

Alienware Arena – Here was a fun little project I was able to crank out for probably the largest client I’ve done work for: Dell. We made them a website for their Alienware brand called “Alienware Arena.”

There were a lot of challenges to this website, mainly timeline and budget. But we were able to walk away happy with our work, and the Dell / Alienware team were really happy. It was interesting going through and trying to copy / mimic the look and feel of the Alienware website. I’m really proud of what we made.

Never Ending iPhone App Store Saga – Anyone who knows me has heard of the bloody wars that my current employer has had with Apple, their iPhone, and the App Store. The ridiculous approval process, the extremely long wait periods, and Apple’s OCD when it comes to their phone. I won’t say much anything else on the topic, but boy it has been frustrating.

What to Expect with 2010

Boy, 2010 will be interesting. What to expect? I’ll be doing some pretty sick programming in jQuery, as I’ll be adding integrating chat to the Dating DNA website. What else? A lot more when it comes to integrating websites into other social network platforms.

From a business platform, 2010 will be a lot of work spent on taking some great ideas and trying to monetize them. While working on awesome stuff is great, its important to pay the bills with them. I will have an entire year to sign up Sponsors for the 2010 UTOS Conference instead of 2 short months.

Hopefully I’ll get in a better habit of documenting my discoveries and solutions here in my blog. Sharing information is the best way to help everyone out.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday and good luck in the new year! 2010, here we come!

Speaking: Utah Open Source Conference 2009

Justin Carmony — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:13 +0000

I will be speaking this year at the Utah Open Source Conference this year. My presentation is “Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites.” Here is the abstract:

Scaling is a real issue for many websites. However, many developers try to implement solutions used by the giants of the internet: Google, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc. However, many of these techniques are designed for very unique and high demand situations. Implementing these techniques prematurely to smaller websites can lead to overly-complex solutions that can be difficult to manage, and even hinder progress.

See real life examples of from two popular websites: cevo.com and datingdna.com. Learn what challenges and bottlenecks they faced, and the solutions they created to overcome them. Find out what optimizations and implementations returned the greatest ROI for scaling with the project.

CEVO is an online gaming league that hosts thousands of matches for hundreds of video game events. They have contracted with DirectTV, Dell, and other companies to offer branded gaming events. Because the company is run by a staff spread across the USA and Canada, the website runs 100% of their business. Hundreds of gaming servers and player clients communicate with CEVO’s APIs to get real-time information. Learn how they’ve handled the ever increasing load on their servers.

Dating DNA is an online dating community that integrates with today’s popular social networking sites. The site has exploded since it released its iPhone App, which is currently the #1 iPhone Dating App. Learn how Dating DNA has scaled from having daily user sign-ups increase 1000% in a matter of weeks.

This presentation will be given by Justin Carmony, a lead developer for both projects.

I will be speaking on Friday, Oct. 9th at 7:00 PM. I’m looking forward to presenting and have my slides done early for once. Hopefully you all will enjoy it! If you aren’t signed up to attend this year, really consider! It is going to be a very awesome, there are a lot of great of local, and national, presenters. Use the coupon UPHPU to get 50% off attendance! See you there!

Utah Monthly Geek Lunch

Justin Carmony — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:27:28 +0000

Just thought I’d advertise this a little. I’m going to this month’s Geek Lunch in Layton at Pad Thai. I’ve never actually been there before, but I’ve heard goo things. If you’re in the Layton area on Friday around 12:30 to 2:00, come have some Thai food! They are also having one in SLC and Provo area. Here is the info:

Salt Lake County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
My Thai, 1425 S 300 W, SLC, UT (map)

Davis/Weber County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
Pad Thai, 1986 N Hill Field Rd #8, Layton, UT (map)

Utah County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
Thai Chili Gardens, 430 West 800 North, Orem, Ut (map)

You can see the original post here.

Speaking: Utah PHP Usergroup – Streamlined Web Development