Bickel Blog

RunSignUp provides cloud services to the running community – such as race registration, running club management, coaching services, and running logs. We are looking for an intern or co-op computer science student with an interest in doing web development.  The ideal candidate will have experience building websites with HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL.  Web design with tools like Photoshop is also a plus. You will be working with a small, but highly talented team with deep experience.  This provides a learning opportunity to work with cutting edge web technology like Amazon EC2, social integration with Facebook and Twitter, Mobile app development, Ajax, REST services, etc. You would work at our office in Philadelphia (20 N 3rd St.) as well as remote (your home/dorm room). Compensation is dependent on experience, but starts at $20 per hour.  Send me your resume - bob dot bickel at comcast dot net.

CloudBees is made up of Open Source veterans.  Sacha Labourey was the CTO of JBoss, Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the Founder of Jenkins and Hudson, Michael Neale, Adrian Brock, Ryan Campbell, Paul Sandoz, Harpreet Singh Vivek Pandey, and many others have spent most of their careers developing open source software.  On the business side, David Skok and I are two well known advocates for the open source business model. It begs the question, why is CloudBees not open source? The fundamental reason is that our goal is to create a new type of software – that is really consumed as a service.  We feel strongly that open source brought a whole new cost efficiency to using software in the enterprise.  JBoss and Jenkins greatly reduce the cost as compared to previous enterprise software models.  The new Cloud era ushers in new levels of cost savings and increased flexibility. In short it required a different model, one that is more hybrid in nature.  Still using and contributing to open source p

While many people are saddened by the loss of Steve Jobs, it goes just a bit deeper for me In 1992 I was at a small consulting company that resold software, Bluestone Consulting.  Mel Baiada was the owner and founder, and was famous for dropping lots of articles on my desk that were interesting.  One day he dropped a video tape of Steve Jobs demoing Next.  It was an over-reaching workstation/operating system/development environment.  But it had the by now familiar Steve Jobs elegant simplicity. The part that fascinated me was a demo of him dragging and dropping a database object like last_name onto a graphical object like a text field for the last name.  Of course Jobs made the demo cool by dragging and dropping graphical objects like a person's picture onto the screen.  Then pushing a button and magically it was an application.  Users of the application could type in a last name and do a search of the database and poof – that person's information would be there, incl