Bickel Blog

I've long been a big proponent of open source - supporting it at companies like Bluestone, HP, JBoss, Hyperic, and Spring.  I still am as witnessed by some of the open source RunSignUp is contributing like our mobile timing app  and our Open API . However, there is an important shift happening with the emergence of cloud services.  The new idea has two parts when it comes to cloud middleware, or PaaS: Wiring together services to develop apps Portability across PaaS so you don't get locked in I wrote about this choice in 2011 and how CloudBees was going to approach it.  The graphic at the right is from that blog. CloudBees has been following this methodology, and had an important announcement with Cloud Foundry today.   As GigaOm put it: So you want to build your software in CloudBees but want to run it elsewhere? With new integration, you can put that application on Cloud Foundry (as well as Google App Engine.) This is the basic mantra of t...

I signed up for the $99 23andme genetic test a couple of months ago and got my health results last night!  Genetics is very interesting to me, and if I were younger it would be my career path.  As research progresses, understanding genetics and applying it will have a huge impact on society over the next 100 years.  For a quick tutorial on genetics, watch  https://www.23andme.com/gen101/genes/ . For the rest of this write-up I am going to focus on the genetics part of things.  Of course environment plays a huge role, we all know that eating healthy can reduce my risk of stomach cancer, etc.  So I will leave that caveat off the rest of this... My Health Results The good news is that I have good health genes.  As the video shows, I have my family to thank for that.  I have several family members that have lived past 100 years old and all of my grandparents were healthy people. The results are pretty interesting.  They are broken into...

Codenvy formally announced their spin-off from eXo and new financing of $9M today . Codenvy does for developers what Google Docs did for Word users - open things up to the Cloud.  That means better collaboration, closer integration with Cloud Services like Github and the PaaS vendors like CloudBees, CloudFoundry, Amazon Beanstalk, etc.  It means faster set-up and team enablement.  It means editing on a Tablet NOW instead of waiting to get back to my desktop and Eclipse.  It means more freedom and more control. The background on this started several years ago Benjamin Mestrallet , the founder of eXo Platform, saw the need to easily create the new wave of applications - easily tying widgets and back end data sources.  He had a crackjack team of developers working on this, and the idea kept expanding.  Last year he realized that this technology was too important to keep bottled up inside eXo.  About the same time, Tyler Jewell joined the com...