The event was hosted by Edventure, a large interactive children’s museum in Columbia. Edventure had the Maker Faire exhibitors to show off their wares in the main atrium while workshops and classes took place in various breakout spaces throughout the museum. There was a wide variety of displays to see and interactive areas to learn something new. Our friend Bryce Bigger was showing off his autonomous Nerf gun as well as letting people test out his Oculus Rift.

The Cowork MYR crew pretty much had a whole room to themselves as our fulltime member Mikkel Green presented on Arduino and Rasperry Pi in a morning session and then presented a second time on 3D printing with the MakerBot. Between the presentations, we had 3 tables set up. One table had various Raspberry Pi and Arduino project boards. The middle table had a soldering station set up where anyone could learn to solder. Finally we had the MakerBot cranking out South Carolina shaped “Make!” souvenirs.  Todd Lewis of Palmetto Computer Labs checked in on us regularly to make sure the day went smoothly for all of the presenters and participants.

The Arduino/Raspberry Pi session was quickly filled to standing room only status. Since the MakerBot presentation was right at lunch time, it was a little more sparsely attended. But Mikkel took advantage of the smaller audience to let them get a little more hands on with the MakerBot. As the day started to close, it became more of a socializing space where we spread the good word about Cowork MYR and the progress of tech startup activity in the Myrtle Beach area.

Overall, the consensus was that this was an excellent first effort for Maker Faires in South Carolina. We look forward to many more popping up across the state over the coming months and years! (Want to fire up a Maker Faire in your town? Read more here.)

We recommend interested parties attend one of our events, particularly Free First Friday, and spend some time in the space.

Most hiring occurs after our members have seen someone ‘in action’ doing quality work, and engage them on a contract-basis for their own projects.

The Reward Board was chosen as the winner of the “hackathon”, a global contest that challenges developers to take an idea from concept to a complete functional product in one weekend, out of 80 international entries. The Reward Board is a self-contained graphical display at a retail location that shows visitors that have recently checked in using the the Foursquare application. Both new and frequent visitors are rewarded at checkin with dynamically printed coupons. Managers can specify many parameters to control the discounts and when the coupons are printed.

The members share the Cowork MYR space however this is the first time The Reward Board team members have worked directly together on a project. Cowork MYR regularly hosts similar events to encourage collaboration and explore new opportunities.

The Reward Board ringing NASDAQ closing bell
Upcoming Cowork Myr Events

We’re primarily looking for local applicants, such as from Coastal Carolina University (CCU) or Horry Georgetown Technical College (HGTC) who would have access to Myrtle Beach year-round.

Focus would be varied but here’s an idea…

• Further develop our Coworking space platform, Lemyr.
• Integrate third-party apps and services into Lemyr’s offerings.
• Research and integrate third-party services into Lemyr and other coworkmyr properties to improve analytics.
• Transition Cocelerator and CoceleratorU from static sites into Jekyll or WordPress.
• Develop or evaluate PitchBurner or YouNoodle as solutions to CoceleratorU.
• Enhance our public-facing WordPress platform by researching, installing, and configuring plugins.
• Work with our Online Marketing intern to implement improvements
• Build your own brand and identity, while taking on client work and training your replacement due to advancement!

We think the best fit for this position would have the following qualities…

• Working knowledge of CSS/HTML and at least one of: PHP, Ruby, Python
• Previously created or maintained websites
• Familiar with the concepts of APIs, SocialMedia, WordPress
• Outgoing and professional communication all around
• Reliable transportation
• Willing and driven to learn, grow, and advance.

We are offering $10/hr base salary. Hours are flexible and we would expect 15-20 hours per week to start, however this can grow to 40/hrs week pretty easily and quickly. This position is currently intended for a 3-month summer internship period.  We’re open to hear suggestions of other arrangements (we certainly would love to see the candidate flourish and continue after 3 months).

TO APPLY: Lets start with email and go from there. Share with us your LinkedIn and Twitter profile. Tell us about your career goals and projects you are working on.

When I walked into Cowork MYR in November, I was simply looking for a place to work that didn’t have the daily distractions of a home full of laundry, dishes, and other remnants left behind by my three kids. I needed a spot to concentrate. After all, I was merely weeks away from launching my national startup company, KidsCanGiveToo.com… or so I thought.

At Cowork MYR I found way more than a clean desk and outlet to plug in my laptop. In fact, I came across what I didn’t even know I was looking for – a ready-made, diverse community of support that seemed to be just sitting there waiting for me to walk through the door.

I had been working on my own for so long and had no idea that being around motivated, like-minded people could be so invigorating and productive. My new Coworkers, full of various talents and insight, immediately cheered me on, and gave me a place to bounce my ideas.

Their honest feedback is, by far, the one thing that served me best in those early days at Cowork MYR. As I said, when I first arrived at the space, I thought I was close to launching my startup, but after consulting with my new Coworkers, I realized that was far from true.

They advised me that the new website I had spent ten months developing was not ready to launch and I should consider creating a brand new site, written using more secure and scalable technologies. You’d think that news would knock me to my knees. After all, I had put my heart, soul, and personal money into this company. But, strangely, I didn’t feel that way at all. In fact, I felt the opposite.

For the first time, since I started developing my concept in 2009, I could clearly see the vision and I felt, well…safe. I felt like I had finally found the right people and resources, all under one roof, that could help me create the perfect platform that KidsCanGiveToo.com deserved.

See, that’s one of the best things about Coworking. It surrounds you with people who understand the value of collaboration, and who feel that your success is their success. Just like they were waiting for me, our growing Cowork community of entrepreneurs, website developers, writers, software and hardware specialists, website designers, videographers, artists, and business consultants are ready and waiting for the next person to walk through the door. We thrive on the growth of our community and the talent and new skill sets it brings.

Would KidsCanGiveToo.com ever have found the vehicle for success it needed without Cowork MYR? Maybe. But, my willingness to stick with it until it was right, combined with the community of people I found at Cowork MYR, accelerated it to not only launch, but to launch ready for success. And now I can move forward with confidence knowing I am with people who are reducing my risk simply by being there…coworking.

1. Pack your shit
2. Get your ass to Myrtle Beach
3. Join Cowork MYR

“Myrtle Beach?!”
Yes. Well actually, this conversation is applicable to many other seemingly uninhabitable areas (aka “Mars”) that have a Startup Revolution effort and attitude like we do. But I’d prefer you consider Myrtle Beach.

“Myrtle Beach: the little sleepy tourist trap by the sea?”
The one and the same. Hear me out though.

“But…Cowork MYR… your shameless plug repels me.”
Fair enough. But I have some legitimate things to say that may compel you!

First let’s talk about you, Startup Founder.

You’ve decided to take the leap and make a serious go of your idea. You’ve convinced yourself and enough other people that, with just the right infusion of resources, you are capable of materializing something of high and lasting value. That’s not always easy to do. Congratulations for making it this far. From this point on, your commitment is to deliver on your promise of producing this thing of value while strategically navigating and eliminating risk.

Even if fundraising went well for you, it’s highly likely your investors gave you just enough resources to move forward but not so much as to be comfortable. If your priority is to make the most of your capital and give your effort the best possible chance at success, then it makes sense that you evaluate your living and working environment.

What if I told you that it’s possible to significantly reduce your overhead while also improving your quality of life?

Myrtle Beach is a funny place. It’s a little big town. At the core, it’s small enough where you can easily network and become just a couple degrees separated from nearly everyone. The cost of living is extremely favorable and you’re almost always less than 10 minutes from the beach (you can actually walk to the beach from Cowork MYR in about 5 minutes). If you’re from an area that gets lots of ice and snow, you will love our weather. Please don’t just take my word for it, check out the analysis from SocialSci Co-founder and TechStars alum Mike Schroll.

The summer rush of almost 15 million visitors ensures that we have access to many interesting amenities that wouldn’t otherwise be available to an area with similar demographics. Our fiber capacity rivals other large metro areas and our Verizon LTE service is fantastic. Our brand new airport with cheap direct flights to many destinations keeps us accessible. We are a melting pot of residents from all over the United States which make us a little more connected to the outside world than you might think.

The opportunity to make a huge impact locally and regionally is very real. Existing institutions and businesses have generally been very open to collaboration and eager to support our endeavors. There’s certainly a “big fish, small pond” aspect when it comes to technology related efforts. How beneficial that is to your startup depends almost entirely on your attitude: do you see a large void or a blank canvas?

It’s not all roses

I have always known that our biggest hurdles to cultivating a startup culture and economy would be access to high quality investors and talent. Much to my surprise, those challenges are rapidly resolving themselves as we continue growing the Cowork MYR membership and the development of our Cocelerator programs. For the time being, if you’re raising millions of dollars and intend to scale your workforce to 200 people, then you’re better off heading to the Valley.

“But I need to be near a hot startup tech scene.”

First of all: No… you (probably) don’t.

What you need is to get to work building your company’s value. There’s a lot of noise and distraction that swirl around the “hot” scenes. Getting sucked into the scene can feel like you’re really doing something and making progress. Before you know it, you’re falling on the wrong side of the line that divides signal and noise ratio… just talking way more than you’re actually doing.

Most importantly, we actually do have a burgeoning tech scene. There’s enough people orbiting around our little hub here at Cowork MYR to keep you stimulated. You can make a huge impact if you’re willing to collaborate and contribute. We are able to create an environment of our choosing. (Let’s have a hackathon! Let’s create a startup accelerator!) Will there be hundreds of people in attendance? NO! There will be much less than that. And that’s awesome because the people that will be the most engaged and genuine people you will find. Less noise, more signal.

The small and rapidly growing group of people powering the Startup Revolution in Myrtle Beach are skilled, passionate, and brilliant. Join us in our effort to colonize “Mars”

This event is free and open to the public Popcorn and soda is on us! But we do ask that you bring $5.00 to help chip-in for Pizza!

Seating is limited…

Check out the details on Meetup.com or our Facebook event page.

Myrtle Beach area app developers gathered this weekend to participate in a “hackathon”, a global contest that challenges developers to take an idea from concept to a complete functional product in one weekend. The 2 projects submitted were GFScale and The Reward Board.

On Tuesday afternoon, NASDAQ and Foursquare selected The Reward Board out of 80 other international submissions. The Grand Prize they received includes a paid trip to New York City later this year to ring the closing bell at NASDAQ in recognition of their innovative idea and quick execution.

Cowork MYR, a coworking space in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, hosted the event at their location. Participants all over the globe simultaneously created projects and completed them within 48 hours. The only requirements were no work could be done prior to the start of the event and it must integrate the services from Foursquare. Myrtle Beach had more registered participants than other larger cities such as Portland, Atlanta, Prague, and Stockholm.

The winning project, called The Reward Board, was created by Cowork MYR members Joe Clarke and Mikkel Green with contributing efforts from Kevin Young, Rocky Dohmen, and Mike Schroll. The Reward Board is a self-contained graphical display at a retail location that shows visitors that have recently checked in using the the Foursquare application. Both new and frequent visitors are rewarded at checkin with dynamically printed coupons. Managers can specify many parameters to control the discounts and when the coupons are printed.

Even though the members have shared the Cowork MYR space, this is the first time The Reward Board team members have worked directly together on a project. Cowork MYR regularly hosts similar events to encourage collaboration and explore new opportunities.

 ”I couldn’t be more proud of our members”, says Paul Reynolds, President of Cowork MYR. “This is truly an ideal representation of what Cowork MYR is all about and confirms that we have talented innovators and entrepreneurs in the area. This is just the start of many wonderful things that will come out of our space starting in 2013.”

Notable quotes from Foursquare:

“We were especially impressed by the strong showings at non-official sites in Madison, WI (hosted bySnowshoe), Myrtle Beach, SC (hosted by CoWork MYR), Tokyo, and Los Angeles.”

 ”Reward Board allows businesses on Foursquare to display real-time check-ins on a monitor in their store or restaurant. Reward Board also shows the current mayor, and a site-specific leaderboard. Business managers can set up tiered rewards and specials for customers to unlock, and even hook up a thermal printer to automatically print receipts. A few of the Reward Board creators Joe Clarke, Mikkel Green, Kevin Young, and Rocky Dohmen will be flown from Myrtle Beach, SC to New York City later this year to ring the NASDAQ bell (and get their faces on TV!). Plus, their app will be featured on the Times Square billboard.”

A brief history of version control

As far back at the 60′s, computer programmers realized there needed to be a way to track and control file changes. These original systems are generically known as “revision control systems” or RCS. The early systems were crude locking and logging style arrangements. One person would lock a file to work in it and then log their changes they made before unlocking it. This wasn’t very handy for collaborative large efforts, so “concurrent version control” (CVS) came into popularity around the late 1980′s. The CVS systems still had the downside of requiring a centralized master file system that tracked everyone’s changes. As an answer to this problem as well as the usability barriers, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame developed Git in 2005.

Git essentially creates a database in your filesystem to track your changes. As you ‘commit’ changes to git, it takes a snapshot of the filesystem along with your notes on what changed. You can then push your database to another git database where others can pull from to get your changes.

Let’s get set up

You’re going to need to be familiar with the command line of your preferred operating system. LifeHacker has a decent primer however I would ignore the suggestion to use Cygwin on Windows. The Windows Command Prompt is plenty sufficient for using Git.

This intro also touches on using GitHub. A GitHub account isn’t required to use Git on your own files, but you may find GitHub rather handy so you may as well create a free profile for yourself.

Next you’ll need to install git. Alternatively, you can install the GitHub app for Mac or Windows. Windows users should consider the the GitHub installer as it also installs some handy utilities that allow you to enter the same command line options as Linux and Mac.

Basic commands: Init, Status, Add, Commit

Pro-Tip: The GitRef site is really handy for a cheat sheet of git commands.

Open a command line. We have to do some up front configuration if you never used git before. The most important part is telling Git your name and email address:

git config --global user.name <Your Name>
git config --global user.email <your@email.com>

OK now we’re ready to go. On Linux or Mac, type ‘pwd’ to see what directory you’re currently in. Use the ‘cd’ command to change to a directory where you won’t mess anything up. Then ‘mkdir’ a directoy called ‘gitintro’ and change into that directory. Next you will enter ‘git init’ to tell Git to set up a new, empty database in your directory.

mkdir gitintro
cd git
git init

Now what? Well get to work! Create files, edit your files, whatevs. But the sake of demonstration, we’re going to do some fake work. Enter these commands into your command line:

echo "Here's some text" > myawesomefile.txt
echo "More words" > anotherfile.txt

This should have created 2 text files in your gitintro directory. Git only watches files that you have told it to track and it is not yet tracking these files. You can tell if you type ‘git status’ in the command line. To have git track a file, you need to ‘add’ them:

git add myawesomefile.txt

If you run ‘git status’ again you will see  that git is now tracking that file. For a shortcut you can type:

git add .

…that will add all untracked files in the current directory. The ‘git add’ command isn’t just for new files. It is used to “stage” the next commit. This gives you control over which files are included in your commit. Now when you run ‘git status’ you will see that git is tracking the files and they are staged to be new. We want to take a snapshot of the files in their current original state. So let’s commit the current files to the database and make a little note about the change.

git commit -m "Created these awesome files"

Git will let you know what it has made a snapshot of for this commit. You can run ‘git status’ to see how that looks when there’s no new files changes being tracked. You can also run ‘git log’ to get a list of the recent commits along with their commit messages (this is why commit messages are handy). Now let’s change a file:

echo "Here's some NEW text" > myawesomefile.txt

This changes the contents of the text file. You could have also opened the file in a text editor to make changes. A status check will show you that  git has detected that the file has been modified. As a shortcut, if you want to commit all of the staged changes for already tracked files, you can use the ‘-a’ option:

git commit -a -m "Made more changes to the files"

I use this all the time because it combines the staging and commit process but it doesn’t work on brand new files that haven’t been added to the git repo previously. You can have git ignore certain files you don’t want to ever be tracked or staged but that’s outside the scope of this intro.

“Branch early, branch often.”

Branching allows you create a new working copy of the file system without actually copying the files to another directory and creating a whole new repo. It opens a whole new set of possibilities for working with your files without multiple disparate copies floating around. Branching is best explained by a demonstration.

You may have noticed in the earlier commands with Git that it mentions “master.” The master branch is created by default. You can see all of the branches in a repo by running ‘git branch’ … the asterisk indicates which branch you are working in. Let’s create a new branch that starts with the files in their most recent committed state. First run ‘git status’ to see if there’s any outstanding file changes that need to be committed. Then let’s make a branch called “alternate”

git branch alternate

This creates the branch but we must actually switch over to working in that branch:

git checkout alternate

Now let’s create a new file, stage and commit it:

echo "There's a snake in my boots" > woody.txt
git commit -a -m "Added woody"

OK so all of this just happened in the alternate branch. Let’s switch over to the master branch:

git checkout master

If you run a directory listing command (‘ls’ on Linux/Mac, ‘dir’ on Windows) you will see the woody.txt isn’t there! Switch over to the alternate branch and check the directory listing again, you will see the file is back. Any changes made in the alternate branch will not affect the master branch. This is very handy if you’re looking to do experimental work or making big changes that you aren’t sure you want in the master branch. Let’s say you’re happy with how the alternate branch turned out and want to merge the work into the master branch…

git checkout master
git merge alternate

All done with the alternate branch? Just delete it:

git branch -d alternate

How would a software developer use branching? Here’s an excellent example.
Remotes & GitHub

There’s one last fundamental aspect of git you should be familiar with and that’s remotes. Until now we’ve been only doing things in you local working copy of the files. A remote is another copy of the repository that you can ‘push’ or ‘pull’ to and it’s the primary way developers share files with each other. Remotes are nothing more than a file path or a URL that point to a git repository. We are going to demonstrate remotes with GitHub. First step is to create a new repository on GitHub and call it “gitintro”. The next screen that comes up shows you the URL of your new git repo.

For the sake of keeping this tutorial introductory, select the HTTP option and copy the repo URL. Using this URL will cause Git to ask for your GitHub username and password any time you push your repo to GitHub. The preferred option is using the SSH. But that requires some extra set up and I want to keep things moving along for the presentation.

Now go back to your command line and add a remote to your repo:

git remote add origin <PASTE YOUR REPO URL HERE>

You have now created a remote called “origin” that you can push and pull your master branch to:

git push origin master

Now if you view your repo on GitHub, you’ll see your files and all of your commit history. If you were working with a team of people, each team member could pull from the remote:

git pull origin master

And receive everyone else’s pushed commits!

Forking & Contributing to GitHub

The beauty of GitHub is how much people are sharing their work on it and how easy it makes contributing to improve that work. For example, let’s say you find a project on GitHub that you’re interested in building off of or using. GitHub offers ways to just download the files if you’d like…but what if we want to add something or fix a problem and contribute our work back to the original source? You fork it!

Normally, it’s code you will find but we’re going to mix it up a little bit and use a class syllabus as an example. Go to this page where I’m hosting a public repo and click the “Fork” button in the upper right corner. When the fork is complete you will have instructions from GitHub on how to set up your local working copy (use the HTTP option for now). Before following those instructions  I recommend going back to your command line you’ve been working in, changing out of the “gitintro” directory and creating a new working directory:

cd ..
mkdir syllabus
cd syllabus
git init
git remote add origin <YOUR GIT REPO URL>

There’s also a handy one-liner to do all this work for you including creating the directory and remote. Don’t be mad at me for not sharing it first, but now you know how it works!

git clone <YOUR GIT REPO URL>

So let’s say you’ve fixed a typo in the text and you really think the original repo you forked from should merge it into their master branch. You simply go to the web page and click the Pull Request button at the top of the page and follow the steps. Essentially, you’re asking that repo owner to pull from your repo into theirs. Hence, “Pull Request.” You could also add a second remote to pull the latest changes from the original repo you forked from. There’s more details here on GitHub.

Want more?

• There’s a much, much more detailed Git tutorial here.
• GitHub has excellent documentation here.

Business As Unusual aims to change that.

Through a loosely structured format of conversation and presentation, Business As Unusual is an attempt to foster connections while inspiring collaboration. Will it work? Well that depends entirely on you. Cowork MYR members are invited to attend for free.