Mark McSpadden

The idea has been burning a hole in my brain for the last 3 or 4 months, and I told my self if the thought persisted until June 1, I would share it with everyone else. So here goes.

(What follows is much more ‘stream of consciousness’ than business plan.)

I would like to start a credit union for Dallas area designers and developers. The goal would be to help members of this unique community buy the tools (and toys) of their trade.

I’m thinking about things like “Adobe Loans” or “Monitor Loans” and maybe even structured savings accounts for those that want save up for these and other toys.

One of the unique things about this group is that there is a large number of freelancers. (Can a copy of a 6 month contract help secure a loan? I don’t see why not.)

I’ve been looking into how to start a CU and honestly I’ve got a ton of questions like:

• Does it really matter whether I go for a State or Federal charter?
• How much in assets does the CU need in order to do…anything?
• Do I need a physical address?
• Oh yeah, how do you run a CU with 0 staff?
• Is this whole thing even feasible?

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg I’m sure.

If anyone is interested in imparting CU wisdom my direction, please do. I know many in the CU world have been talking about a new kind of credit union, I think it’s time to start seeing if that can be a reality.

Call me, email me, twitter me. (469.226.9488, markmcspadden [at] gmail, markmcspadden)

Note: To me this all sounds like a great fit for a credit union, but I’m also open to looking other FI models if they would serve this model better. (A prosper group may be able to achieve much of what I’m talking about.)

Last night I gave a presentation to the Dallas.rb group on Ruby message queues. If you’re interested, download the pdf or the demo apps and have a look. (Note: I’m also in the process of producing a voice over version of the presentation. Mostly just to see if it can be done.)

• Ruby Distributed Processing and Message Queues: Dallas.Rb March 2008

Demo Apps from the Meeting. These apps assume you have the starling and memcache-client gems installed.

Checkout doc/README_FOR_APP for some explanation of what’s going on.

• starling_demo
• starling_demo_workling

If you’ve got questions or corrections to anything you see, feel free to give me a shout!

It’s been a while…almost a month…so I thought I do a quick update (in chronological order):

• My wife and I bought our plane tickets for our two week excursion to Europe this summer!

• My wife started a personal blog for us! This is great because 1) it gives me a appropriate space to post my “personal” stuff (like the Europe trip thing) and 2) she did it all my herself! I’m a proud nerd!

• I joined The Garland Group as a full-time employee. We do IT audits and risk assessments in the wonderful world of banking. Most of my work will be centered around building software to make this process easier, more efficient, and more collobrative.

• I finally made it to a Dallas.rb meeting (after showing up a whole day early) and a Refresh Dallas meeting. I really enjoyed both and hope to make my attendance more regular.

So there’s the update. And now an announcement. I plan on moving this blog in a more development centered direction as a way to share the experiences I’m having at work and in code. So don’t be surprised to see a lot rails and javascripts posts. You have been warned :)

Public Apology: I would like to tell Adam Keys that I am sorry for skipping Dallas.rb for the second month in which I planned on attending. The mailing list confirms that it was, as always, a stellar meeting and I am a lesser person having missed it. We’ll see if April can remedy my skipping streak.

I spent my Thursday evening in the company of about 30 other like-minded fellows (and one like-minded lady) at DemoCamp Dallas that was hosted by Sabre out in South Lake. Not gonna lie…little skeptical going in…but I had a great time and highly recommend you come with me to the next one!

There were six presentations of all-working-software-no-slides goodness that I just ate up. I just get stoked seeing people apply software technologies in ways that never have crossed my mind! Anyways…I’ll stop getting all nerd-giddy over here and just say the presentations were awesome.

As this was also my first “community” event, I also got to meet some really cool people. I am really looking forward to getting out from behind my desk more and becoming involved with people and events like this.

Bottom Line: If you like software, go to the next DemoCamp Dallas!