by Philip Yurchuk | Feb 6, 2014 | Career, Software
Last night I attended an Orange County Tech Startups event on the future of innovation and startups in OC. Shervin Talieh put together great panels and I heard some interesting stats provided by journalist Chris Casacchia of the Orange County Business Journal (we need an infographic!). We heard how there are a number of billion dollar business in OC, but they’re in diverse fields. As most know, hardware, aerospace/defense, biotech, and action sports are more prevalent than software.
Here are my reasons for OC’s failure to launch a big startup culture: (more…)
by Philip Yurchuk | Feb 1, 2014 | Travel
I spent the whole summer in Prague, the longest stay of my trip. It is without a doubt the most architecturally beautiful city I’ve ever visited, and I can’t imagine that any city in America comes close. We have our natural wonders, that’s for sure, but we’re too young a country to have truly beautiful cities. I mean, name one city that has a real castle. You can’t.
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by Philip Yurchuk | Dec 2, 2013 | Software
At the next Orange County Java Users Group meeting I will be giving an intro talk on Talend Open Studio. I chose to speak on Talend because I found it to be a highly productive tool for creating data integration (ETL/ELT), schema migration, and batch processing jobs. The full abstract is below. (more…)
by Philip Yurchuk | Jul 5, 2013 | Travel
“Let me show you a miracle.” said the beautiful Ukrainian woman. “Give me your hand.” Without a second thought I placed my hand in hers. Then, despite my immediate protestations, she pulls out a fancy 2-sided emery board and begins buffing and polishing my right index fingernail to a brilliant shine. “Really, that’s OK. I don’t need-” She interrupts, “You have girlfriend? Wife?” “Why, no but-” Oh right, she’s trying to sell me 2 of these. Thus I was introduced to Kyiv. I will say, the product worked and that fingernail was shiny for 2 weeks just like she said, but I never saw any Ukrainian men walking around with ultra-shiny fingernails. Just gullible Americans. (more…)
by Philip Yurchuk | May 4, 2013 | Travel
Tokyo is a city of wonders and isolation. I wanted to wait until I left to write this up, because I didn’t want to besmirch the city. Keep in mind, I had the highest hopes for Tokyo, and expectations are everything.
Tokyo is clean and modern, perhaps more than any other city I’ve been in. What was interesting was how something had to go wrong for me to realize that everything was going right. While walking near the prime minister’s residence, I smelled something bad. Was that… the sewers? Yes, it seems so. In Bangkok, you are constantly walking past a sewer that had become ripe, but that was the only time it happened in Tokyo. Someone beeped, and I realized that unlike Cebu, people aren’t doing that constantly. The weather predictions were accurate. In Bangkok and Cebu, not once was the current weather report correct with regards to precipitation, much less what would happen in a few hours. A train is a minute late. Huh, that never happens. Unfortunately, the biggest timing problem in Tokyo was the cherry blossoms arriving 2 weeks early, followed by rain and powerful winds, ruining my chance of seeing them on all but one tree. Thus were dashed by dreams of walking around Yoyogi Park while listening to Cherry Blossom Girl. (more…)
