After a successful event in 2012 with 10,000 attendees and 88 events, it’s no surprise Technically Philly brought back their popular Philly Tech Week festival for 2013. Bringing together the techies of Philadelphia, Philly Tech Week offers a week-long celebration of technology and innovation. The annual week of events is intended to grow the impact of this innovative region through programming focused on technology, collaboration and improving Philadelphia.

As members of N3rd Street, we mark our calendars pretty far in advance! For the past two years, we’ve even hosted our own Tech & Design Themed Quizzo along with fellow tech friends, PhillyCHI. Check out our recap, as the I-SITE crew lists their favorite events attended this year:

ABBY FRETZ / Project Manager
Friday, April 19
Geek Brunch
The Philly Geek brunch, hosted at Green Eggs Cafe’s Center City location, provided geeks with an ultra relaxed setting to meet other geeks in Philadelphia and exchange stories, upcoming events, and general geekified conversation about their respective tech endeavors.

In a single hour-long meal, I had great conversations with representatives of Skout Media, TicketLeap, RealFoodWorks, DrinkPhilly, and several others. The Philly Tech Week crew has thoughtfully built an event lineup that provides hugely varied opportunities for networking and exploring the Philadelphia tech scene.

CHRIS ELL / Developer
Thursday, April 25
I-SITE and PhillyCHI Present: Tech & Design Quizzo
Myself and a team of five fellow techies took on the Quizzo challenge on Thursday night that covered all things tech at The Trestle Inn. The questions ranged from who designed the “I <3 NY” campaign to who the creator of Linux was. Perhaps the best round though was the ‘Image Round’ which consisted of 12 different computers through-out the century, including the fictional HAL 9000. We ended up taking 2nd place, winning us $25 towards our tab and semi-bragging rights for the next year until next years Quizzo.

DANA PAVLICHKO / Graphic Designer
Thursday, April 25
I-SITE and PhillyCHI Present: Tech & Design Quizzo
Last Thursday a few dozen of our fellow nerds joined us for Tech and Design Themed Quizzo at The Trestle Inn hosted by I-SITE and PhillyCHI. A few favorite questions included: What metal was originally used to cast type? What was the first fully digital communication system? When is Siri’s birthday? Congratulations to all the winners, and we hope to see you all next year!

JESSICA CHAPPELL / Director of Strategy and Operations
Thursday, April 25
Philly Give & Get Charity Auction
As part of Philly Tech Week, I attended Philly Give & Get at National Mechanics. The premise of the event was a charity date auction, where professional experts in the community were auctioned off along with a customized experience. This allows participants to have an adventure with an expert to learn more about a topic they’re interested in. The event raised $5,120 to fund summer enrichment programs for kids at Philadelphia Center for Arts and Technology.

STEVE MANGIONE / Director of Development
Sunday, April 21
Killing Joke at Union Transfer
Though it wasn’t an “official” Tech Week event, I have to mention the Killing Joke show at Union Transfer on Sunday, April 21st. Killing Joke were one of the forefathers of “industrial” music, and technology played no small role in their sound. The band has been releasing albums steadily since 1979, and even though they have featured a revolving cast of members over the years, they are currently touring with their original lineup (which is a small miracle in itself!) Here are some Vines from the show to give you a little taste of the energy and excitement that night:
https://vine.co/v/bUla2X5WnWl
https://vine.co/v/bUlA6mqibi7
https://vine.co/v/bUljEgBLA5Q

There’s nothing quite like gathering 30-40 programmers at a bar and giving them all a few drinks. This took place last Tuesday night at Old City’s National Mechanics where Philly.rb, Philadelphia’s very own Ruby user group, gather to discuss all things tech. There were 3 talks, 1 lightning and 2 standard presentations.

The first talk was an introduction to VIM. For those who may not be familiar with this, it is a popular text editor that was written 21 years ago. Now for users such as myself, I have always been more comfortable in text editors such as SublimeText, TextMate or BBEdit. It emphasized the importance of how to recover files on windows acting quickly and not overwriting any data on the drive. VIM is an entirely different ballgame. It uses commands as your primary way of editing text. Where you would traditionally bring your cursor to the start of a sentence, highlight maybe 5 lines and hit ‘Delete’, in VIM you would first make sure you are in ‘normal mode’, then issue the following key commands: d4$ , or delete 4 lines($ = lines??). But then as more and more commands began to be done, the speed at which the presenter was able to modify code showed obvious efficiency improvements to other editors. Now it’s just time for me to learn another 300 shortcuts and find somewhere for my brain to retain them. Learn more about VIM by either opening your Terminal application and entering ‘vimtutor’ or through this very interesting site http://vim-adventures.com.

The second talk was titled “Beverage Driven Development” given by Brian Auton (@brianauton) and focused on using Mocha, Chai, and Konacha as tools to test your javascript in a Rails application. TDD (or test driven development) has become a standard among developers in where tests are written for your code in order to make sure it works. This way when you begin to implement new features down the road, you can rerun your earlier tests to make sure all your code still works. This testing has often revolved primarily around testing your server-side code and actions to make sure that it was functioning properly, but never really your client-side javascript. Throughout the presentation, Brian went over examples of how to write tests so that not only can you continuously test your server-side code, but also your client-side code.

And the final talk was given by Jason Garber(@jasongarber) and was titled “Chef for people who aren’t named Mat”. While the joke of the title may be lost by most (Mat Schaffer was the original head of Philly.rb and an avid chef user), the lecture was very informative. Many Ruby/Rails developers are used to creating servers by hand or using Platform as a Service providers such as Heroku where server administration is taken care of for you. Chef is a tool that allows a developer to create a set of instructions to be sent to a server to be executed. These instructions can then be used to install packages, create users, make folders, or configure files in order to make the whole server provisioning process much more automated. It works so well that you are able to reuse the same set of instructions to set up as many servers as you’d like, over and over, with the same results every time. However, this technique can often be overwhelming when approached by some developers. Jason’s lecture gave a great overview of how to get started from a practical application of the tools. He has a sample project that he has been working on that can be found here and also suggested visiting learnchef.com.

For those of you out there and interested in Ruby, or even any other language, I would strongly recommend coming out to the next Phily.rb meetup. It’s a great time!

As part of 2013 Philly Tech Week, PhillyCHI and I-SITE will be co-presenting Design & Tech-Themed Quizzo. Come sip 60s-inspired cocktails, munch on buttered popcorn, and show off your brains! Our very own Dana Pavlichko will be co-host for the evening.

To help you bone up on what you’ll need to study, here is a taste of last year’s favorites:

• Name all 3 pixel densities (ppi) of the iPad 1, 2, & 3.
• What is the origin of the Python scripting language’s name?
• and the ever-popular segment, Name that font!

Where?
The Trestle Inn
11th & Callowhill
Philadelphia, PA 19107

When?
Thursday, April 25
6PM-9PM

Cuss! This event is currently sold out, but if you’re not signed up, you’re not out of luck! If you are not on the list, feel free to come by for Quizzo standing up! Afterwards, The Trestle Inn will be hosting a Trestle Special Go Go Party, Penny Nickles’ 70s pop dance party, Spare Change 10PM-2AM. No Cover.

Cipher Prime, a Philadelphia-based game studio, is holding an event called Gaming as Therapy: A Pathway to Interaction this Friday, April 19 at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The event will explore video games as a potential form of therapy for autism, and as a social bridge between autistic and non-autistic people. how to recover corruped save file ps4

They’ll be sharing their games (including Auditorium, Pulse, and Splice) and Dain Saint, the co-founder of Cipher Prime, will be one of three speakers talking about the relationship between games and autism.

Everyone is invited to learn more about gaming and play a few in the process.

When: Friday, April 19 at 6:00PM

Where: The Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia

Price: $10 / $9 for educators / $5 for members / Kids under 12 FREE

Buy tickets here.

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