News

ALEXA SKILL COMP!

Hey everyone, we have a big announcement! Next Thursday 28th June from 4: 30 pm until 5: 00 pm we have Puay San from Amazon arrive at 2pi Software CoWs (Co-working Space). She is a leader in the Amazon Web services (AWS) Educator program, she'll be here to teach us and the students more about AWS, Alexa and help out with any of the team of students ideas for a skill in the Alexa Skill Competition.

The competition, held by Amazon and 2pi Software, is about the Artificially Intelligent VUI (Voice User Interface) "Amazon Alexa"! We are getting as many Students as we can to gather teams.

A presentation was held by myself, Jorden Dakis, and local student Hunter De Jong, at the last Code Night at CoWs about the details of the competition as well as introductory information on Alexa Skills. The competition is focussed on building an agricultural themed application for the Alexa using the Alexa developer and other Amazon Web Services to create a skill over the next 3 months. The skill can be created in teams of 3 or less. We encourage any High School student who is interested to contact us at 2pi Software to get involved and get their team together! A great opportunity! Whoever develops the most creative skill wins an accommodated trip to Canberra's AWS summit, and other prizes yet to be announced.

Here at 2pi Software and CoWS Near The Coast Bega, we will be holding a support session every Friday from 3: 00 pm until 5: 00 pm where we can help out the students competing with any problems or with their ideas for the Alexa as well as interest them in what we have created. The first session is held this Friday the 22nd of June! Anyone is welcome to come so bring all your mates! Again 3: 00pm to 5: 00pm! Can't wait to see everyone and help with their ideas. This Friday is a good chance to get stuck into it so we can all be prepared for Thursday 28th of June when Puay San is here.

So form a team! Come to CoWs this Friday 22nd of June! Learn from Puay San next Thursday 28th of June! Win Prizes!! Can't wait to see you all and what you can create!

I'll be back to write about Puay San's visit and what the students learned.
Thank you, Jorden Dakis 2pi Software.

This Blog series will follow my journey to became a coder in a small town called Bega.

My name is Jorden Dakis,  I finished school in 2013 and at that time I didn’t have a clue on what I wanted to do! So I decided to get a job and save some money and give myself some time to think about what direction I wanted to take - 5 years on and I’ve discovered a path that will help me work towards what it is I want to do and that path was to learn Coding/web-site development.

Coding really interests me, I have always had skills with computers but never tried to hone in on those skills or considered them a potential avenue of employment. If I was to do this I could use these skills in the future for my own business and to help me gain a valuable skillset!

The most daunting part is...just on 4 weeks ago I quit my very stable job. But I needed to do something else. With no job to go to and only a vague idea of where to start, I quit, despite being advised it was potentially a bad idea - I decided to take a leap of faith and set out on an unknown journey to create a more fulfilling and valuable life for myself!

After around 4 days of unemployment I received a message from Adam Buckley, who is a coder himself at 2pi Software in Bega asking if I wanted to come in and have a chat. So the next day I made my way to the CoWs Near The Coast (co-working space) to talk to Adam, it was an awesome conversation and ended with being told that I was welcome to study at CoWs and eventually possibly a job! A week after I had a chance to speak with Liam O'Duibhir (co founder of 2Pi Software) and Jason Badham (web-developer/designer at 2pi software), another pleasant conversation, I was told that I could have potential work there once I have learned enough which was amazing!

It's been amazing so far spending time there, meeting everyone, receiving so much advice and knowledge. I've started to learn the basics of front end coding; starting with HTML, CSS and Javascript. I'm using the site FreeCodeCamp as well as other sources recomnended to me by the staff at 2pi Software. So far I've made a draft webpage and have started on my portfolio which is very exciting and interesting. I am excited about developing my skills further and learning how I can apply these skills in a meaningful way within a business environment!

The biggest lesson I have learned so far is that if you put yourself out there, opportunities will come to you.

Thanks for reading, till next month! Jorden Dakis.

PHD Researcher, and regular visitor to the Bega Valley, Tim Mahlberg (https://au.linkedin.com/in/timmahlberg), has co-authored a compelling 'state of the nation' report on coworking in this country entitled 'Coworking Spaces Australia'.

The document is available to the public here (http://sbi.sydney.edu.au/coworking-spaces-australia/)

The report is choc full of data-based determinations, anecdotes, insights and commentary on the diverse range of coworking spaces that have been springing up all over Australia for almost a decade now.

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The team at CoWS Near The Coast are deeply honoured that Tim and his co-author, Kai Riemer, saw fit to feature CoWS as an archetype of 'genus' Townhall Terminal. They sum up one of the chief drivers behind our space very well when they say ' the locals are fiercely proud of what this space stands for: taking the local economy into their own hands and not waiting for government or corporates to lead the way'.

As the very first 'hand-cranker in chief' of the high profile NAB Village in Melbourne Docklands, Tim Mahlberg is one of the most qualified people in Australia to chronicle and comment on Coworking in this country. His strong links to the activator community, those poor burdened souls who do much of the heavy lifting to create the spaces, makes him a popular figure, keynote speaker, and frequent panellist at coworking events and activities in both regional and metropolitan areas nationwide.

Thanks Tim and Kai for the acknowledgement of CoWS Near The Coast, one of the first ever regional co-working spaces to be set up in Australia. We wish you every success in your future endeavours.      

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A nationally significant StartUp pitching event visits Bega in a fortnight's time, on April 27th. The Regional Pitchfest (regionalpitchfest.com) team, headed by Di Sommerville will present an information evening on the programme, and, for maximum fun, oversee some practice pitches on the night.

Pitches are only 1 minute long...so get practicing if you would like to do one on the night, or just rock up and pull one out of your proverbial there and then.

Please register here - https://www.stickytickets.com.au/51751

The competition has a finals event in Wagga in August.

Let us know if you are attending - we are expecting to have about 10 to 15 people pitching on the night.

Please circulate this PDF Poster to anyone you may know - PF020 Workshop Poster A3 S2V1

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We are delighted to host Brendan Yell (http://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanyell) representing SoftLayer (an IBM company - http://www.softlayer.com/about-softlayer). Not only is Brendan sharing his insights and experience, SoftLayer provide a range of free introductory offers for Cloud Services to budding StartUps.

Listen to Brendan's radio interview recently in the Hunter Valley - https://soundcloud.com/1233newcastle/is-there-a-silicon-valley-in-the-hunter

Format as follows :

08:30 AM Breakfast and Networking

09:15 AM Brendan to compere...

• The 12 skills of Christmas' - introduce the new batch of skilled sea-changers...one by one...and they speak for 3 minutes...and perhaps, for another minute they field a question from the audience, or chat with Brendan

10:15 AM Quick break to refill people's coffees?

10:30 AM Brendan to deliver 30 mins 'How to run a startup from the regions - tips and tricks'

11:00 AM Brendan to live mentor 3 lucky people...we can organise them prior, or pick them from the audience.

11:30 AM More Networking

We are offering breakfast to the attendees (or at least the first 20 to register on Eventbrite)....

More details about Brendan...here are the details of his previous visit in August...

"How to be a Rockstar Founder"

Brendan Yell

Director, Community Development, SoftLayer

Founder, ShopFree.com

Mentor @ Muru-D, Amcomm Upstart, Slingshot, Jumpstart, TechBeach

After creating an online service for use of his friends at age 14, working at CompuServe at age 21, running Optus Interactive Strategy at age 25, then founding and lauching ShopFree.com at age 27, there is not much Brendan Yell has not seen. In this talk, Brendan will walk you through some of his successes and failures as a founder, and teach you some key lessons to being a rockstar founder. He'll also relay some great stories of working with iconic rock band INXS, when he looked after their Internet strategy and digital rights.

Plus Intro to the SoftLayer Catalyst Startup Program

Who qualifies?

What credits can I apply for?

How does the mentoring work?

Leveraging the global network

This week we have been given the opportunity to conduct our work placement for I.T VET at 2pi Software. Within these days we have been able to set up a small web server running an Odroid as the master system, which had a load balancer installed, using Nginx, to evenly spread the traffic from incoming requests.

A load balancer is a device that evenly distributes incoming traffic between nodes. This increases the amount of requests and will increase the reliability of the server, which is critical for a company's efficiency for their online presence. A company that uses load balancing is Google, which would have a massive load of requests being sent to the servers, which will then have to be evenly distributed across all their servers.

The requests were then distributed across 3 different Raspberry Pi systems, low cost, high availability micro computers that allow users to achieve goals such as learning basic coding to more experienced projects like creating a mini arcade machine.

These were then benchmarked to see how much stress the server will be able to take when under a heavy load of requests. We recorded our results and then compared the data to make sure the nodes were running at the same efficiency.

Also during the week we were given the task of making a MySQL database which was hosted on the Odroid to observe how the web server could handle the load of running a MySQL database with PHP.

Setup

Our setup looks like this: 

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Results

We ran multiple tests using different types of media, these include:

• Static HTML
• Static HTML with an image
• PHP
• PHP and MySQL

The results we collected are below, where data presented ranges from the 50th to 100th percentile. The number on the right of the percentage indicates the response time in milliseconds.

These results show that using more complex web tools will slow down the web server significantly. This is shown in the odroid with PHP & mySQL  which has results that are double of the static HTML.

The centrepiece of this upcoming coding night is an exciting project...and will be delivered by Steve Ryan. Please read Steve's description below...it's a terrific project....  

Hey all, so having met Scratch for drag and drop programming I wanted an easy way to enter longer pieces of music as Scratch blocks so I could integrate animations with the music.

http://abc2scratch.2pihosting.com/ is a javascript app (https://github.com/syntithenai/abc2scratch) to help by taking abc notation, rendering as music notation and offering export to scratch blocks.

http://abcnotation.com/ describes the text based ABC format for writing music and provides heaps of examples.

I'm running a demo next coding night taking an ABC tune from the web, adding parts and animating it in Scratch. I've recently aquired a Lego EV3 and I'd love to connect scratch and coreograph dancing robots. I'm having trouble getting s2bot working to extend Scratch to provide EV3 blocks. Any experience out there?

Having had trouble with quicktime playback of midi, I've included a pure javascript midi playback solution using soundfont files. (currently broken but I have had it working - pull request on git anyone?). Scratch seems to do timing well when playing generated notes but not so well on the timing of playing back recorded sounds. Any experience?

If anyone is interested I'd like to arrange a Scratch band by combining a bunch of musical sprites into a composition. To get the ball rolling I'm calling for musical sprites

• The must in the key of C so all the sprites overlay in harmony (more or less). Mostly this means that the sprites last musical note must be C.
• The sprite must be 1,2,4,8 or 16 bars length.
• The sprite must be categorised (in it's filename) as rhythm, bass, harmony and melody. Typically a melody part would be 16 bars.
• The sprite must have costumes indicating active/inactive that are shown when the music starts/stops. More costumes or other animations throughout the musical fragment are encouraged.

For those with skills in music notation, another project could be a 12 bar blues.

C C C C

F F C C

G F C C

cheers

Steve

The NSW Governor, His Excellency General The Honourable David Hurley AC DSC (Ret’d), popped in to visit CoWS Near The Coast Digital Co-Working Space on Friday the 20th of Feb 2015.

His Excellency has a keen interest in innovation in rural and regional Australia, and during his visit met with a number of the highly-skilled and entrepreneurial people who utilise the CoWS facility.

It was a huge morale boost for all those involved in CoWS to have the space recognized in this manner. In promoting the tech sector and providing an 'on demand' office environment for local digital professionals, CoWS is pointing the way towards a new economic future for the region based on the provision of skilled services and the creation of Intellectual Property that can be sold or licensed throughout the global marketplace.

His Excellency's visit was timed impeccably - CoWS has just celebrated it's one year anniversary. Already in these early chapters of the CoWS story, the space has been teeming with activity, a highlight of which has been the frequent coding events, as well as numerous networking and special interest group meetings.

See the Bega District News report here.

In another first for the Sapphire Coast, the team behind CoWS Near The Coast are delighted to be chosen as the first site in the region to benefit from the Google Inside treatment.

Thanks to Chris Sheedy from Reflexe Content for his drive and energy in pushing this forward.

Check it out :-