“Code Camps have been taking place all over the country. This is a free, one-day event put on by the local Phoenix community to help promote software development in general. There is no right or wrong language, platform, or technology. If a topic relates in any way to the code that causes a machine to produce a desired result, it’s welcome here.”

This year it will be held at the DeVry University Phoenix Campus and is once again being organized by Lorin Thwaits.

Flatterline will be teaching two sessions this year in the 21st Century Software Development track: Developing with CouchDB and Understanding functional programming.

The schedule became available today, so if you haven’t registered do so now and build your schedule for Saturday. It looks like there are a lot of great sessions this year and we can’t wait to learn from all of our colleagues. See you there!

At Flatterline, our stated mission is to help startups realize their vision. To that end, we’ve decided to help bring OpenCoffee Club to Phoenix.

What is OpenCoffee Club?

OpenCoffee Club is a weekly gathering of entrepreneurs and investors in an informal setting (a.k.a, a coffee shop). The goal is to bring these entrepreneurs and investors together to talk about projects, collaborate and get to know each other.

It was originally started in London by Saul Klein, a venture partner at Index Ventures. Since then, over 80 OpenCoffee Clubs have sprung up worldwide. You can read more about it on Saul’s blog or at ReadWriteWeb.

Why?

On a recent trip to Boulder, CO I attended an OpenCoffee Club facilitated by Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group. It was really inspiring to see such a vibrant startup community meeting regularly to discuss ideas, share problems, give advice and, most of all, listen to each other.

We believe that Phoenix has a lot of talented, entrepreneurial people. We want them to have the best chance to grow and succeed and this is one small way we see that happening.

The first meetup will be on Thursday, April 30 from 8am – 10am at Fair Trade Coffee. Please let us know you’re coming.

In what other ways can we help the Phoenix startup community thrive?

If you are a highly mobile laptop user, chances are you work out of a lot of varying public locations such as coffee shops, libraries, and just about anywhere that has public wifi. Are you concerned about the privacy of your data? If you’re like me, and our clients, you’re very concerned. Applications like tcpflow and Wireshark are not only particularly effective at grabbing content from the network, they also happen to be readily available.

Here’s a very simple scheme to leverage the inexpensive power of Amazon’s EC2 to create a disposable, secure proxy.

Getting started

You will need the following to make this recipe work:

• Amazon AWS account
• A Ubuntu-based Amazon AMI with keypair (we are using public ami-7cfd1a15 for this article)
• An EC2 security group allowing a minimum of port 22 for SSH

To start, launch a small instance of your AMI of choice.  Once again, we prefer Ubuntu so most of this article is going to be Ubuntu-centric.  This instance will need to be setup with whatever key pair you plan on using as well as be placed in the security group that allows SSH access.  If you need help with this the Amazon AWS console is particularly useful.

Putting the pieces together

Once the instance is made available ssh to your newly created instance.

ssh -i identity_file -L 3128:localhost:3128 root@public_ec2_domain_name

The noteworthy addition to the previous line is -L 3128:localhost:3128. This addition to the SSH command will open port 3128 locally and forward all traffic to the remote port 3128 across the open SSH connection.

Once the connection is open you will need to install a proxy, we prefer squid.  Squid can be installed through the following command:

aptitude update
aptitude install squid

The last remaining step is to configure your browser of choice to use proxy localhost:3128.

The final result is all local HTTP traffic will be relayed across local port 3128 across the encrypted SSH tunnel to the 10 cents / hour remote server. From there it will go out to the internet at large away from the prying eyes of nefarious coffee shop patrons. Keep the SSH connection open for as long as you need access to the proxy.

Cleaning up after yourself

When your done at the coffee shop feel free to decommission the AMI instance and you’re done. The machine will go away with all records of the proxy’s cache.

If you’re looking for a solution to more than just your HTTP traffic you have options such as OpenVPN. Look for an article from us soon.

Thank You!  Thank you for the support, the referrals, the chats, and everything else!

In the last month we have been approached by numerous individuals and companies who have been searching for developers.  They all said they were referred to us by people in the community that had favorable past experiences with us or because they have worked with us directly.  I cannot even begin to say what a compliment it is that no sooner did we form a company that people are already being referred to us.

The only downside to all of these referrals is that we simply cannot take on all these clients.  Curtis and I fundamentally believe, and agree, that we are not in any rush to grow or take on more clients than we believe we can handle at any given time.  That being said, we absolutely believe in referring potential clients to people who do have the capacity and availability for more work.  If your a development shop we will happily try and pair you with the awesome clients that we don’t have the capacity for right now.

The ultimate goal is a win-win for clients and other developers.  We want our potential clients to know that we value their time and future success, and sometimes that future success means hitting the ground running immediately with other developers in the community.

First and foremost, I would like to thank everyone that’s wished us luck on this endeavor!  All the support has really meant a lot to us.  I would also like to thank everyone that has so innocently asked “Dude, why do you still have the default WordPress post up?”  The essential answer is that everything came together so quickly for Curtis and I to put this company together that getting some content up became a secondary-but-still-really-high-priority item.  Which I am now rectifying…

That being said, the weeks ahead are going to be busy.  Amazingly wonderful and deliciously busy.  Next Thursday Curtis and I, along with several other cohorts, will be trekking out to Texas for SXSW.  We plan on spending some time to really get the name out there, so if you’re going please help spread the word to your entrepreneur friends (more on why we’re focusing on this segment to come!).  We’re also going to be looking to make this page a little more “custom”.  Sure, it’s a nice theme but it would benefit from a logo (which we don’t have) and some more style (which we have, but not in CSS form).

Personality Flatline has taken a temporary hiatus while we are getting everything in motion, but rest assured the content on my harddrive that was recorded mid-December is still both salient and awesome.  If we do it right, all the references to “the holidays” will seamlessly sound like Easter.