This book isn’t necessarily anything new. Most of the guidance is common knowledge, the author even says so himself. What is incredible about this book is hearing the stories of how one man applied those values in a big way. One example is how Jon concluded a merger with another company. In this merger, the Charles Miller Smith, the other company’s CEO, was distraught after his wife’s passing. Instead of continuing to negotiate, Jon signed the deal knowing he could have gotten a better price, to the tune of $200 million less. Continuing to negotiate would have taken advantage of Charles Miller Smith. The deal may not have been great, but it was good enough and in the process Jon gained a lifelong friend. In Jon’s words,

Make it a point to never misrepresent or take unfair advantage. That way you can count on second and third deals with companies after successfully completing the first one. Have as a goal both sides feeling they acheived their respective objectives.

There are many more examples but I can’t do them justice. Winners Never Cheat is an inspiring, quick read that I definitely recommend.

For the slides, click here.

Why is this an important topic? Web applications are omnipresent in how we interact with the world. In contrast to native applications (which run on one device), web applications run on multiple devices, allowing consumers to access their data from anywhere. For this presentation, will talk about the techniques that Rackspace uses to build web applications that support customers in managing 2.5 million paid mailboxes and over 110,000 Cloud customers.

• When: Dec 6th @ 6pm
• Where: Rackspace Blacksburg Office inside the University Mall next to Sushi Factory
• Will have pizza and drinks

Rackspace Tech Talk – Udi Dahan from Brian Hartsock on Vimeo.

Here is a little more information about Udi taken from his website:

Udi Dahan is The Software Simplist, an internationally renowned expert on software architecture and design. A solutions architecture and connected systems MVP, 5 years in a row, Udi is also one of 33 experts in Europe recognized by the International .NET Association.

During the past decade of consulting with enterprise clients and large-scale web sites, Udi noticed they all needed service bus technology but that none of the existing offerings were good enough. After 5 years of growing a framework used by his clients in the most severe production scenarios, Udi released NServiceBus to the world. Since then, it has had over 10 major releases and is now used by companies, large and small, all over the world both for its scalability and simplicity.

We are very excited about this tech talk and hope you can make it out.

• When: November 15th @ 6pm
• Where: Rackspace office inside the University Mall next to Sushi Factory
• Will have pizza and drinks

• October 4th, 6pm – Informed Design with Rackspace Experience Design Team
• November 15th, 6pm – Large Scale Distributed Systems with Udi Dahan
• December 6th, 6pm – Building Killer Web Apps with Dave King, Sr. Developer at Rackspace

Our first talk is quickly approaching next week! The Rackspace Experience Design team, a group of awesome designers and usability experts, will be presenting on Informed Design. More specifically, using generative and evaluative research to create FANATICAL user experiences. UX research comes in many flavors: usability testing, user interviews, field studies, A/B testing, analytics, etc. The Rackspace Experience Design Team will share examples of how to use a mix of research techniques to inform design decisions

Here are some of the details:

• When: Tuesday October 4th, 6pm
• Where: Rackspace, 755 University City Blvd, Blacksburg (Look for flyers to lead you to the right room)
• Food will be provided
• Bring a friend or two, this is a public talk open to anyone.

Hope to see you all there.

Hey everyone had first day of classes today thought you guys would find the syllabus to one of my classes hilarious.

Goals:

Learn HTML
Learn JSPs
Learn CSS
Learn Struts
Learn Ajax
Learn Javascript
and JMeter (don’t actually know Anything about this one)

Objective: To be able to work on and maintain a web-app running on Apache Tomcat

First Project: Take a webapp that has only in-line styles and set up a CSS page that will make the site look the exact same.

I feel like I Win this class.

Thanks for everything I learned there!

– John C

This intern spent the summer working on an HTML/JSPs/CSS/Struts/Ajax/Javascript web app, the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel. In a couple months, he was able to make significant improvements to our CSS and image sprites, not to mention other enhancements and bug fixes. Rackspace gets a ton of great code out of our interns, while the interns get to work on real products, get paid, and then get easy A’s.

Pretty sweet deal.

OS=`uname`
 
if [ "$OS" = "Darwin" ]; then
  echo "Running on Mac"
else
  echo "Running on Linux"
fi

Also, uname -n will return the computer name if you want to check that as well.