Welcoming Jake, and this week in conferences

Team Lanyrd is now four people: Jake Archibald, front-end developer extraordinaire joined us permanently on Wednesday, and is already hard at work on an awesome new project.

Jake's arrival meant we maxed out our desk space in our shared office, but thankfully the room next door was up for grabs so we now have six cheap IKEA desks (and two IKEA sofas) in our very own space.

We've adopted a "deploy on your first day" policy for our technical hires, and Jake was the first guinea pig. We currently deploy using Fabric scripts running in our development environment (an Ubuntu virtual machine running in VMWare Fusion which emulates our production environment).

Jake's first deployed feature was the icon next to the "View on Google Maps" link (e.g. on dConstruct's page) - not a big feature, but deploying it required setting him up with source control, a development environment, our deploy scripts and getting to grips with how our templates and CSS work. All in all a very useful exercise.

This week in conference video

We sponsored DjangoCon US in Portland a few weeks ago, and the videos from the conference are now available on the site. If you watch closely you should be able to spot a whole bunch of Lanyrd Lanyards.

Several videos have now been published from GoGaRuCo, San Francisco's annual Ruby on Rails conference. More to come soon, published by the excellent Confreaks team.

The New York Python community hosted PyGotham last weekend, described as "mostly Python, some random, all awesome". Videos of the sessions are now available.

And finally, last week was O'Reilly's Strata in New York. The big data and analytics conference in Santa Clara earlier this year was such a hit that they produced three follow-up events in New York: Strata Jumpstart, Strata Summit and Strata New York. The latter two both have videos of the keynotes available on YouTube.