January 2014 Summaries

DigitalOcean is sponsoring HackTech, a college-focused hackathon in California. The event allows students to work on projects and develop prototypes with teams, emphasizing the importance of developers and bottom-up adoption of technology. Participants will have a limited time to complete their projects, but even those who don't win prizes can still network with top talent and collaborate on innovative ideas. The goal is for participants to come together and use technology to transform concepts into reality.

DigitalOcean has launched a new series called Inside DigitalOcean, where community members share their experiences and insights about the tech world, startup culture, and more. Featured in this series is Brooke McKim, an engineer at DigitalOcean since 2013, who shares his journey into development, favorite projects, and advice for aspiring developers. He expresses enthusiasm for Ruby as a programming language and praises open-source projects like Nginx and Rails. Additionally, he highlights the growth of the JavaScript community and trends like Ember.js, while mentioning his love for music and attending festivals like Bonnaroo.

Angular.js Conference will be held in Salt Lake City from January 16th through Friday, featuring top speakers including Brian Ford, a Google developer. The conference aims to deliver high-quality training on the Angular JavaScript framework and provides an opportunity for developers to network and join the conversation on the future of tech. The event is sponsored by the organizers, who are also excited to meet other developers and showcase their products, potentially even hosting a party led by Chief Evangelist @jedgar.

The Digital Ocean team has compiled a list of twenty talented web developers they believe are worth following. These individuals are not only skilled in their craft, but also share valuable insights and knowledge through their social media presence, blogs, and open-source projects. The list includes developers from various backgrounds and expertise, such as JavaScript, Python, and PHP, with many having notable achievements in the tech industry, including founding companies, creating popular libraries and frameworks, and contributing to open-source projects. Many of these developers are passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion in tech, and some have even started initiatives to make technology more accessible to everyone. The team at Digital Ocean aims to highlight these individuals as inspirations for web development and innovation.

Meatspace, a new web service and mobile app created by Jen Fong-Adwent, was launched on August 23rd, 2013, as part of the DigitalOcean community. The service combines elements of Twitter, Snapchat, IRC, and other popular platforms, allowing users to create short updates with attached GIFs that disappear after ten minutes without accumulating identity over time. With no usernames or passwords required, Meatspace aims to provide a unique, ephemeral experience. The code for the app is available on GitHub, enabling developers to create their own custom apps if desired. According to Jen Fong-Adwent, there's something appealing about animated GIFs and real-time interactions that drives the service's design.

DigitalOcean participated in TechStars back in 2012, which was a transformative experience that helped them refine their product and business strategy. The company credits the program with teaching them valuable lessons about creating minimum viable products, analyzing metrics, and incorporating customer feedback. DigitalOcean is now sponsoring TechStars again to give back to the community and show gratitude for the opportunities they received during their time in the program, which had a profound impact on their growth and success.

Ubuntu is the most commonly used Linux distribution among the services offered, with over triple the number of instances compared to its closest competitor. The company has been tracking one-click installations since June last year and has recently added Docker and MEAN to their offerings, although these are still catching up to more established options like LAMP stack. The company plans to continue building out their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities with one-click installations for additional languages such as Python and Node.js in the coming year.

The DigitalOcean community has reached its one millionth Droplet milestone, marking a significant achievement in the company's history. The winner of their #MillionthDroplet contest is Christian Pekeler, founder of Kindermatik, who will receive $10,000 in hosting credit. Christian's SaaS product DailyChildcareReport.com uses Ruby on Rails with extensive Javascript usage and aims to utilize Meteor as its next framework. Born in Glückstadt, Germany, a city known as Lucky Town, Christian grew up there before becoming the community's millionth Droplet user. To celebrate this milestone, DigitalOcean is giving away $10,000 in hosting credit to the winner, who must be the first user to spin up the millionth Droplet and include their Twitter handle in the hostname, tweeting with the hashtag #MillionthDroplet.