The Hackathon Was Amazing

More details later, but just a quick note to thank all of the sponsors and volunteers and participants who helped make the Hackathon a huge success. Here are the winners and here are some cool photos.  Stay tuned for video, too!

Help Us With Ignite Baltimore

Recently friends have been offering to help us with Ignite Baltimore. It's a true labor of love that's completely powered by volunteers, donations, sponsors, and goodwill and I'm super psyched that people want to help.

However, it's hard for me to know how serious people are.  Heather, Neal, and I have various responsibilities divided up between us but there are plenty of things that we don't have time to do or can't do as well as a dedicated person might.  So, as an experiment, I'm putting this list out into the ether to see who might step forward to take up one or more of these projects!

• Organizing an after party: It would be nice to have a really well-planned event immediately after each Ignite that we could funnel the audience towards. Ideally it would feature live music by a Baltimore performer. This event would probably need separate sponsorship.
• Creating content for our website: I'd like us to post things like follow-up articles with Ignition Grant winners and past speakers, interviews with upcoming speakers, etc.
• T-shirt printing and sales: we have a few custom-printed shirts that the organizers wear, and people often ask where they can buy the shirts.  We could really use someone to step up and take charge of this, including selling the shirts at events.  Ideally they could be sold online as well. All proceeds would benefit the Ignition Grants. 
• Manage Facebook presence: I'm in charge of this right now and just don't have the enthusiasm for Facebook that I do for Twitter. I'd love to see someone become the guru of our Facebook page and turbocharge it.
• Manage LinkedIn presence: Ditto.
• Manage media partnerships: We have great relationships with The Urbanite and MD Daily Record. I'd love someone to take this over and start recruiting a few new partnerships (like a radio station).
• Print marketing: We don't do anything with postcards or flyers right now. I feel like we could diversify and renew the audience further by trying this for the next Ignite.
• BmoreSmart: We're part of this group of social entrepreneurs. They have all kinds of interesting projects and opportunities.  Helping them would be a great way of helping us!

If any of those catch your eye please email me at mike@subelsky.com.

Thanks!!

The Baltimore Hackathon

We are having a hell of a good time organizing the first Baltimore Hackathon. The idea is to assemble teams and individuals to build software and hardware projects from idea to prototype in one weekend: 11/19-11/21.  Our motto is "Build. Meet People. Have fun."

We're awarding cash prizes to the winners and door prizes to all participants.  We're gonna have opening and closing ceremonies, free food from Puffs N Pastries, and other surprises.

We're organizing it using the TechInBaltimore Google Group. I'm really amazed at how people are coming out of the woodwork to sponsor, volunteer, coordinate, etc.  This is the most decentralized can-do project I've been involved with!

If you're in the MD/DC/VA/PA/DE area or beyond, I hope you'll consider coming to be a part of it!  We're really hoping to draw in people to our tech community who don't participate in other more purely social events.  This is all about making!

Social Media for Everybody, Redux

This week I had the chance to give my "Social Media for Everybody" talk to two different groups of people.  I promised everyone who attended that I would post the links and slides to the talk here on my blog.  Follow this link and you'll find everything.

Thanks to everyone for attending!  I really enjoy helping people navigate this world as it's been so personally enriching to me and helpful to my projects.

Some Baltimore Technology Heroes

I'm very grateful to have been nominated for a few nice awards this past year because of my work with Ignite Baltimore and other ventures. But there are others in Baltimore who are doing as much or more than I am to encourage Baltimore's development as a technology hub. Since these are annual awards, I'm hoping the organizers will check them out when it comes time for the next round of nominations. They've all got my vote!

• Heather Sarkissian: I profiled her on BaltTech a few months ago. She deserves recognition for starting BmoreSmart, leading the Betascape effort, being one of the main organizers of Techcrawl East, and being one of the organizers of Ignite Baltimore.
• John Trupiano and Yair Flicker: These guys own SmartLogic and have donated a considerable amount of time, money, and resources to the tech community. They have led the growth of the Bmore on Rails group from a mere monthly meetup for Ruby enthusiasts to a full-fledged networking and teaching society with weekly events for web programmers. They spearheaded the welcoming committee for June's Railsconf convention, and they funded the organization of a highly-regarded free unconference called BohConf. On top of that, they were also principal organizers of TechCrawl East.
• Mike Brenner: He's just getting started but by the time 2011 rolls around he will be a serious contender. Baltimore was lacking a specific group that focused on technology entrepreneurship and he has taken up the charge with Startup Baltimore. They've had several well-attended startup breakfast meetings followed by workshops. This is probably the most energetic long-range community organizing effort we've seen to date.
• Nate Mook: He was the co-organizer of TEDxOilSpill and one of the main organizers of TEDxMidAtlantic. These events are some of the highest-profile, highest-quality happenings in town and have brought a lot of outside attention to the city.
• Baltimore Node Organizers: These people have built a mecca of Maker culture in Station North.  The key players that I know of were Adam Bachman, Jon Lesser, Mark Huson, Kelly Egan, Matt Forr but let me know in the comments if I left someone out.

Who did I miss?  Let me know and I'll update the post!

Side note: Baltimore is an extremely friendly town that embraces new projects and new leadership.  There are lots of other cool things that could be done to keep our momentum going, and you can expect that even a modest amount of effort on a meetup, hackathon, cofounder dating event, blog, podcast, or whatever will be recognized and celebrated!  That's been my experience with Ignite and the Baltimore Improv Group.

Let's create a New Defense sector

I'm fascinated by Peter Thiel's essay "The Optimistic Thought Experiment". It's about globalization's past and future and has many awesome things to ponder, but as a technologist and entrepreneur this paragraph grabbed me, emphasis mine:

Technology entrepreneurs and investors would do well to return to hard and important problems. As globalization proceeds apace, the decisive unsolved problem concerns the issue of security. There remains a tremendous need for real defense against the proliferation of destructive technologies — reaching well beyond the Orwellian “defense” industry, with its proclivity for constructing new contraptions that kill large numbers of people. Along with the New Economy and New Media, there should exist a valuable sector that could be described as New Defense — at least in any twenty-first century in which humanity does not blow itself up. The absence of such a sector serves as a subtle reminder of the complacent myopia of Silicon Valley venture capitalists investing in “technology.”

I don't know what this means for me personally yet but I'm pretty excited to think about it.  I can't find the links anymore, but it reminds me of criticism that emerged from last year's Techcrunch 50 event, about how most of the 50 companies were not working on anything that would fundamentally improve the human condition.

Why You Might Not Want That Cybersecurity Job

Update: I receive occasional inquiries for cybersecurity career advice because of this post. I haven't worked in this field in years, so I recommend you read this advice if you're trying to get a cybersecurity job.

Cybersecurity, while offering lucrative job opportunities, might not be an ultimately rewarding career for Maryland technologists. I worked in this sector for about eight years as a military officer, government civilian, and government contractor in a variety of different roles, and here's what I want to say about it.

Maryland's business press, government officials, and various tech organizations have lately been enthusiastically banging the gong for cybersecurity.  I can appreciate why - there's a lot of money at stake, and a lot of it comes from Maryland's foremost benefactor, the federal government.  This is a recession-proof, guaranteed-to-grow industry, and Maryland is already home to many successful cybersecurity companies like Sourcefire.  The government and private companies employ many thousands of people and contribute many millions of dollars to our tax base.

So it makes sense for our government to be pursuing these opportunities, but does it make sense for you, Maryland hacker?  Here are some things to consider; these are obviously generalizations extrapolated from my experience.  Feel free to leave comments if you feel this is a gross distortion.

• Cyber defense is often the opposite of a creative activity; in many of these jobs you're going to find yourself acting as an enforcer, a mere gatekeeper.  You'll be telling the creative people in your organization all the things they can't do or aren't allowed to have.  Often you'll be restricting them not because of policy reasons but because it's too hard to figure out how to allow them to do what they want within the regime you are enforcing (Naturally this does not apply if you work for a company that builds the tools the enforcers use) or because it's just easier to say "no".
  
  
• In classified settings, you are severely restricted in the sources and kinds of technologies you use.  You'll be leaving your smartphone and your iPad in your car or in a locker outside the SCIF.  You won't have admin permissions on the machine you're working on.  Forget installing Chrome with the latest extensions, you'll be lucky to get version 2 of Firefox!  Or you might not have access to the Internet at all!  Also, forget about telecommuting or riding your bike to work; your job will be in a well-defended federal facility or an anonymous office park in the suburbs.
  
  
• Because cybersecurity is so tied to "the enterprise", you'll almost certainly be living in Microsoft land, which may or may not be a problem for you.
  
  
• Many of the government organizations in this field are gigantic, top-down, and super-hierarchical. You will made to turn as a soulless cog in a giant machine.  There are plenty of smaller, more enlightened companies out there, of course, but the highest paying jobs will probably be offered by big contractors.
  
• The federal government has crazy monopsony power over this sector.  Besides the usual and expected bureaucratic games you'll endure, if you work for a private company that does much business with the government you are going to see some brutally depressing market distortions that arise from this monopsony.  You may find yourself working on a product or a program that nobody in your client agency cares about, or wants to succeed, except that they need to spend up their budget dollars so Congress doesn't take the money away next year.  Or you might find your job in limbo because the sales cycle for getting government contracts is so long, and it can take forever for the company to actually have money in hand.  There's some truth to the myths about the Pentagon spending $10K on toilet seats - it probably does cost about $9950 in sales salaries to sell a $50 toilet seat to the Department of Defense!

I was well-paid as a cybersecurity analyst, and often I did enjoy the work, and parts of it involved amazingly cool, James-Bond-like exploits.  But those are the reasons I ultimately chose to leave. Now I am working on my own startup.  My job is less glamorous (I'm not "saving the world" every day) but because my individual contribution counts thousands of times more in a small company which I own a piece of, and because every second and every dollar counts, it's an infinitely more satisfying way to spend my time.  My labors are simply more meaningful.  So that's what I wanted you to know.

UPDATE 8/16/10: Please check out @NetSecGuy's post where he further elaborates on these issues.

POSTSCRIPT FOR MARYLAND GOVERNMENT AND BUSINESS LEADERS

I applaud you for positioning the state to take advantage of the "cyber doom boom".  I'm sure it will help many of my fellow citizens in the short term.  But I wonder how much wealth you think cybersecurity is ultimately going to create in Maryland, especially if it accrues to big consulting companies like Booz-Allen that aren't even based here.  Also, what's going to happen when this sector matures, when Internet security gets better, and spending declines?  Who's going to fill up those office parks and abandoned SCIFs?

I implore you not to neglect other parts of Maryland's Internet tech economy, because it's product companies like Advertising.com, BillMeLater, Millenial Media, Localist, Ipiqi, Common Curriculum, Figure53, Replyz, Deconstruct Media, and a bunch of others I can't think of right now that are building a new, sustainable post-industrial base in our state.