Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup

Watch insightful presentations and mingle with like minded hackers and entrepreneurs at our monthly meetups.

Can't make it to the event? We'll be broadcasting LIVE (http://vokle.com/lineups/7510-los-angeles-hacker-news) via webcast using Vokle (http://www.vokle.com).

Sponsors Wanted! We're still looking for a food/drink sponsor for this month's meetup. If you or your company is able to help let me know!

Speakers and topics:

Aman Gupta, and Giles Bowkett

John Buckman (cancelled):

Unfortunately due to a scheduling error (on LA Hacker News' part) John won't be able to make it in time to speak today. He'll likely be joining us for drinks post-event however.

Aman `tmm1` Gupta, San Francisco, CA (Via Live Internet Broadcast)

Aman is a serial entrepreneur, ruby hacker and a recent winner of a Ruby Heroes award. He currently maintains the EventMachine project and various other gems that help build high-performance distributed and asynchronous systems in ruby, including em-mysql, em-spec, jsSocket and amqp.

Most recently, Aman has been hacking on performance improvements to MRI, and tools for the VM such as perftools.rb, a sampling profiler for ruby code based on google-perftools, and gdb.rb, a MRI specific version of gdb.

Giles Bowkett: A Year Of Entrepreneurial Experiments

In 2009 I created a miniapp every month (in actuality only several months). In 2010 I launched a minibusiness every month (in actuality only several products and a few minibusinesses). When I began at the end of 2008, my plan was to combine the two in 2011, by launching a serious tech startup or two, and that's one of the things I'll be doing this year. But I had interesting surprises along the way that made me question the whole idea of using tech to make money at all, when I discovered the existence of simpler and probably superior ways of achieving wealth, security, and similar goals. I'll talk about my successes, my failures, and why Hacker News brought tons of traffic to my blog - until the year I actually began making money as an entrepreneur.

About the speaker:

Giles Bowkett wrote a Ruby AI drum improviser, built a very popular video site which must remain nameless as part of a very small team, has spoken at between 15 and 20 Ruby conferences and user groups, and gets up to all kinds of mischief.